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2001 Acts of the imagination: postmodern thought and the writing of history Holly A. Raatikka Iowa State University

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Holly Ann Raatikka

A thesis submitted to the graduate faculty

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

Major: English (Rhetoric, Composition, and Professional Communication)

Major Professor: Michael Mendelson

Iowa State University

Ames, Iowa

2001

Graduate College Iowa State University

This is to certify that the Master's thesis of

Holly Ann Raatikka

has met the thesis requirements of Iowa State University

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ForJ. D. H.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: THE REJECTION OF POSTMODERNISM BY TRADITIONAL HISTORIANS 1 Historians Do Not Pay Much Attention to Theory 4 Historians Have Been Influenced by Lawrence Stone and Ugly Debate 5 Historians Embrace the "Ideology of the Real" 6 Historians Hold to a Less Exacting Definition of"Knowledge of Truth" 7 Historians Perceive Postmodernists as Misinformed about the Nature of History 8 Historians Operate from an Epistemological Base Nurtured by Their Discipline 10 Historians Believe that Postmodernism is Just One of Many Approaches to History 12 Historians Assume That Their Discipline is Threatened by Postmodernism 13 Historians Think Postmodernists Exaggerate the Opaqueness of Texts 14 Historians Consider Postmodernism to Be Depressing 17

CHAPTER 2: THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION: R. G. COLLINGWOOD'S ANTICIPATION OF "POSTMODERN" HISTORIOGRAPHY 19 Collingwood's Methodology 22 Collingwood's "Pre-Postmodern" Influences on Historiography 26 Collingwood's Anti-Positivism and Reaction Against the "Realists" 27 Collingwood's Epistemology 29 Collingwood's Method and Social Construction 32 Anti-Postmodern Trends in Collingwood's Method 35 Universal Idea of History 35 Texts are Transparent and Qualitatively the Same 37

CHAPTER 3: THE LITERARY IMAGINATION: HAYDEN WHITE'S "POSTMODERN" HISTORIOGRAPHY AND COMPARISON WITH COLLINGWOOD 42 White's Major Contributions to Historiography 44 The Meaninglessness ofthe Past 45 Emplotment: Framing Events into Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire 47 The Four Tropics: Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony 50 What Constitutes a Good Historical Narrative 51 Giving History Its Meaning Back 53 Moving Beyond Narrative 55 Comparison of White and Collingwood 59 Nature of Historical Writing 61 Narratives as Constructed 62 How to Overcome Objectivity/Subjectivity Problems 65 Nomological Theory 66 Definition of History 66 v

CHAPTER 4: APPLICATION: A "POSTMODERNIST" APPROACH TO THE 1919 "SPEECH" CASES 68 My "Postmodemist" Methodology 68 Using An Epistemology or View of Knowledge Appropriate for History 70 Describing the Historian's Context 71 Asking Questions that are Relevant to the Present 72 Acknowledging the Web-Like Structure ofHistorical Knowledge 72 Identifying Plot Structures/Meaning Makers 73 Linking Historical Knowledge with Practical Benefits 73 Application: "Postmodemist" Historiography and Schenck and Abrams 74 Narrative: The History of the Written Opinions Handed Down by the Supreme Court in Schenck v. United States and Abrams v. United States 74 Conclusions that can be Drawn from My Application 92

NOTES 97

WORKS CITED 101 ---·------

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION: THE REJECTION OF POSTMODERNISM BY TRADITIONAL HISTORIANS

"Historiography"1 and "postmodemism" are two words that, until very recently, never occupied the same sentence yet alone the same discipline. However, given postmodemism's preeminence in rhetoric and literature, it is surprising that history, a discipline that largely concerns itself with written texts, has never felt the full effect of the "linguistic tum."

Rather, most historians let out a collective groan when the word "postmodemism" is even mentioned. It is widely assumed by those both inside and outside of the historical discipline that postmodemism is a philosophy confined only to a group of fringe historians. As Perez

Zagorin writes, "History ... has shown itself to be considerably more resistant to postmodemist trends [than literature]. This, at any rate, is the strong impression I have derived from the postmodemist debate among historians as well as from my reading of historical books and articles in diverse fields and from the statements of well-known academic historians" ("History" 9). Zagorin, one of the foremost objectors to postmodernist theory used in relation to historical inquiry continues, "As Kant once said of skepticism, it is not a dwelling place for the human mind; I believe that the same is equally true of postmodemism" (24).

There are several reasons why postmodemism is generally regarded as incompatible with "doing history," and by exploring them, I will be able to better address the primary goal of this thesis: to articulate one of many possible "postmodemist" methodologies for inquiring into history. Before I do that, however, it will be helpful to look at my working definition of postmodemism, especially since the term is highly overused and misunderstood. Steven Best and Douglas Kellner write: -----~~-~~~~~-~--~~~~~-

The confusion involved in the discourse of the postmodem results from its

usage in different fields and disciplines and the fact that most theorists and

commentators on postmodem discourse provide definitions and

conceptualizations that are frequently at odds with each other and usually

inadequately theorized. (29)

While I am not prepared to sort out the strands of postmodemism or give a definitive explanation of all the nuances of its different forms, I do wish to address the aspects of postmodemism that I believe could have important bearing on the writing of history.

Although postmodemism is sometimes thought of as being synonymous with relativism, an "anything goes" mentality in the arts, and the decline of Western culture, this popular conception ofpostmodemism is a gross simplification of it and is reflective ofhow the media portrays cultural life in contemporary America. However, when I use the word

"postmodemism," I am referring to a certain epistemological viewpoint that acknowledges that the truth is difficult-or rather impossible-to ascertain. To me, postmodemism is a scepticism that should lead scholars to adopt a humility that admits that everything we

"know" has been shaped by our own particular viewpoints made up of our presuppositions, preconceptions, and prejudices that we bring to the object of our study. Therefore, objectivity is impossible, because scholarship-even the selection ofwhat is deemed important~is highly shaped and determined by the personality of scholar.

Postmodemism, in response to a plurality of perspectives that seem equally valid and yet produce different answers to the same questions, holds to the tenet that there is no ultimate truth, or if there is, it is unknowable. This is in some ways a reaction against the logical positivists who were operating at the end of the nineteenth century, who believed that 3 the entire universe was potentially knowable through the application of scientific methods to the objects under study. The positivists thought that everything could be explained by

scientific laws. Of course, Thomas Kuhn's The Structure ofScientific Revolutions has shown that knowledge-even scientific knowledge-is largely contingent upon language and

symbol systems, and this book helped to dismantle a positivism that was already on its way out of the academy.2 While most historians today are squeamish about postmodemism, they cannot be said to hold to its opposite extreme, nai've positivism.

Moreover, because postmodemists contend that there is no knowable ultimate truth, it follows that there is no absolute basis for meaning; instead, meaning is socially constructed.

In other words, people make sense of their world by constructing self-referential systems that supply their own foundations from which knowledge can be built. Therefore, historical accounts ultimately impinge, not on reality, but on social conceptions about how that reality works. This means that there can be no "grand narratives" (to use Lyotard's term) or theories that explain life for all times and all cultures and all peoples (Best and Kellner 27). Insofar as some historians seek to find "covering laws" to explain historical occurrences, postmodemists assume that this is a vain endeavor.

Additionally, postmodemism denies that the historian can be an objective observer of historical evidence and an objective author of historical accounts. Historians tend to see what they want to see from the evidence, and their own persuasions and biases about the evidence will ultimately surface in the narratives that they write. In fact, narrative, because it endows events with an interpretation of their meaning, can never be objective-there are no objective perspectives from which to write. Therefore, postmodemism would ask that historians stop writing history in such ways so as to assume a pretense of objectivity. ------

Instead, postmodemists want historians to be as self-reflexive as possible so that their readers can be more aware of some of the biases behind the writing ofhistory.

Finally, postmodemism assumes that texts are not transparent, that is, authorial intent cannot be perfectly extracted from the text by the reader. Therefore, when the historian interprets past texts or pieces of evidence, he or she will face hermeneutical problems that can never be completely overcome. Moreover, the historian can never perfectly transmit an existential set of events through his or her account because readers of that account will face similar complications of interpretation.

At this point, the reader might already recognize some qualities of postmodemism that seem to conflict with the epistemological basis that is usually required in order to "do" history. However, to explore these incongruities between postmodemism and traditional conceptions ofhistory systematically, I am providing the following list often reasons as to why postmodemism has not yet made a significant mark on the historical field.

Historians Do Not Pay Much Attention to Theory

Although it is only partly a factor, a large reason why the mainstream of the historical discipline has not embraced postmodemism is that most historians pay little attention to historical theory. Other historians, who might occasionally read articles that deal with theoretical matters, find theory mildly interesting but do not actively seek to apply theory to their historical methods. Across the discipline, there is a general feeling that historical theory is largely irrelevant to the practice ofbeing an historian, as Zagorin claims, "[T]he majority of professional historians ... appear to ignore theoretical issues and ... prefer to be left undisturbed to get on with their work ... " ("History" 2). Brian Tierney, a renowned medieval 5 scholar, confesses, "Metahistory is a fascinating subject in its own right, considered as a branch of epistemology or linguistics, but it has little to do with the activity of the simple working historian" (qtd. in Zagorin, "History" 2-3, n. 3). For a discipline that hardly gives heed to theoretical concerns, we should not be surprised if postmodernism has had little effect.

Historians Have Been Influenced by Lawrence Stone and Ugly Debate

For those historians who do pay attention to theory and the philosophy of history, many of them have been influenced by Lawrence Stone's 1991 article, "History and

Postmodernism," which was a scathing indictment against postmodemism. This is not to say that individual historians are not able to make up their own minds about postmodemism; however, this article set the highly antagonistic tone of the debates between the supporters and haters ofpostmodernism in the discipline ofhistory. Those historians who were not directly involved in the debate might have been repulsed by such hostility, damning postmodernism-its cause-along with it. At least, Geoff Eley and Keith Nield believe that this might have been the case. Eley and Nield argue that Stone set the tone of the conversation between those in favor ofpostmodernism and those who are not by "call[ing] the profession to the defence of its integrity against the corrosive influences of relativism, post-structuralism, post-modernism, and other contemporary ideas" (356). Because of the alarmist stance Stone's article took, it is likely that historians who read it were left at least a little wary of postmodernism. ------~------~--~-

Historians Embrace the "Ideology of the Real"

One ofthe largest objections to postmodemism is its seeming rejection of the real.

Postmodemist historian Patrick Joyce labels this particular incongruity between traditional historiography and postmodemism the "ideology of the real" (78), that is, most (if not almost all) historians believe that historical events are real; true reality does exist; things did happen in times past. Many historians are under the assumption that postmodemism denies this basic tenet, which is so central to the pursuit of historical knowledge.

For example, Chris Lorenz puts it poignantly that "history is a discipline and not a form of art" (314). As such, it deals with truth claims, not the imaginary or the unreal.

Moreover, Lorenz argues that history is "an empirical discipline" (326, emphasis in the original). Lorenz believes this is so because, unlike the novelist, the historian interprets evidence that is known to others in his or her field; likewise, the historian must be able to withstand public criticism of his or her work. If history were not based on real knowledge, then challenges to historical accounts by other historians would be impossible. However, historians are constantly trying to deteimine "which narratives are empirically adequate" and which are not (323). Therefore, the historian is accountable to others in his or her field to produce narratives that square with the evidence. As Lionel Gossman says, "Modem historiography, like modem science, is a professionalized and regulated activity in which no individual can any longer imagine that he or she works alone or enjoys a special relationship to the past" (qtd. in Lorenz 326). Moreover, since the reconstruction ofhistory is largely a collective pursuit, historical evidence cannot be arbitrarily cast aside. Historians cannot ignore part of the available set of evidence "or make of it whatever they please" (Zag orin,

"Historiography" 272). ------~. ------

However, Joyce argues, "What is at issue is not the existence of the real but-given

that the real can only ever be apprehended through our cultural categories-which version of

the real should predominate" (78). It is safe to say that postmodemists also believe that real

events occurred in history; however, the second an historian (or anyone else) attempts to

articulate those events in language, an interpretation is occurring, obfuscating those real

happenings. David D. Roberts, not a full-blown postmodemist but an historian whose work

has been shaped by postmodem influences, acknowledges the "widespread

misunderstanding" among historians that postmodemism "den[ies] reality and truth" (391).

However, Roberts also defends historians against postmodemist claims that they purport to

know objective truth: "[H]istorians have shied away from claiming full presence, the whole

story; provisionality, incompleteness, and an element of guesswork have long seemed

inherent to the historian's enterprise" (391). Ifhistorians would only switch their

conceptions, seeing postmodemism as the dogma that denies that one can fully know reality

and truth, they might find it fitting to their discipline.

Historians Hold to a Less Exacting Definition of "Knowledge of Truth"

One of the rifts between postmodemism and historiography is caused by the different

views of truth of the postmodemists and historians. Although postmodemists believe that

historians' attempts to portray objective truth are futile and deceptive, historians argue that

they are aware that their accounts will be eventually revised; they genuinely believe in the

tentativeness of their claims. The misunderstanding here arises, according to Lorenz,

because the postmodemists view knowledge as episteme (that is, unimpeachable knowledge)

while the historians view it as doxa (opinion) (322). Although this may seem like a reversal 8 of roles (postmodemists deny that episteme exists and wish for historians to see that they propound doxa, or a "truth"), Lorenz argues that postmodernists see a faulty "opposition between knowledge and interpretation" while the historical discipline inherently recognizes that all historical knowledge is merely interpretation of the evidence. Likewise, Roberts, who bridges the gap between postmodemist and traditional historian, argues that history is provisional (391).

However, the potential unification ofpostmodemism and history is not advanced when Lorenz blames the disintegration of differentiating between these two kinds of truth on the former. "[S]ince episteme proved to be a false ideal, its distinction from doxa has evaporated, and fallibilistic truth-theories have taken the place of foundationalism and its picture theories oftruth" (325). If anything, postmodemism can be defended from this charge by asserting that most historical accounts at least pretend to be objective, which means that they state claims as if they were episteme even if their authors know those claims to be doxa. At the same time, if those authors believe the truth claims that they assert in their writings to be doxa while the postmodemist is telling them that the truth cannot be known, those historians are likely to think that the postmodemist knows absolutely nothing about the nature of the historical discipline.

Historians Perceive Postmodernists as Misinformed about the Nature of History

Part of the reason why most historians express hostility towards postmodemism is that they perceive postmodemists as unknowledgeable of the historical discipline and at the same time trying to tell them what to do. Hayden White claims that there is no set way of doing history, and therefore not much special training is needed in order to be knowledgeable ------~ ~-~------~~ -~ ---

of the discipline; however, many historians disagree with White on this point. These

historians believe that historical evidence naturally dictates how accounts are logically put

together and that those who deny this obviously are not well enough acquainted with the

practices of the discipline. In rebutting the thought of the two "postmodemists" most

frequently attacked by traditional historical theorists, Hayden White and F. R. Ank:ersmit,

Lorenz argues,

White's narrativism is built on two distinctions that do not show up in the

practice of history: first, a distinction between literal and figurative language,

and second, the exclusive use of literal language during the phase of research

and the use of figurative language-read metaphor-during the phase of

composition or writing. The same distinctions and presuppositions are, as we

observed, crucial for Ankersmit's narrativism. (327-8)

Clearly, Lorenz believes White and Ankersmit to be uninformed about the true nature of

writing history. Thus he continues, "The 'metaphorical tum' as formulated by White and

Ankersmit is therefore inadequate as philosophy of history and should be replaced by

analyses that suit the practice ofhistory better" (328, my emphasis). Lorenz speaks for most

historians who, having never been educated to see the practice of writing history as a literary

event, do not like to be told by those perceived as outside the discipline that they need to

embrace more postmodem techniques of historic portrayal. Eley and Nield also comment

about how historians react against postmodernism because of its practitioners' "sometimes

peremptory, exhortatory timbre, its apocalyptic and apodictic tone" (355). Accordingly,

most historians feel that the postmodemist camp is saying, "Historians must do this, they

cannot ignore that, they had better get their general act together" (355). ~~~------~~--~ ------~--~~-~--

Of course, this hortativeness does not rest well on the ears of historians who feel that

the postmodemist does not have an accurate conception of the nature of"doing history."

Zagorin points out what could be the most salient reason why historians tend to ignore or

despise postmodemism: "most [professional historians] are unwilling the accept

[postmodemism's] view of history because they find it so contrary to their own personal

understanding and experience ofhistorical inquiry" ("History" 9-10).

Historians Operate from an Epistemological Base Nurtured by Their Discipline

By now, it should be obvious that the disciplines ofhistory and language arts rest on

epistemological foundations that are at variance with one another. These differences in

epistemology largely explain the cool reception ofpostmodemism in the field ofhistory.

Historically, these differences arose because of the stratification and specialization of

knowledge that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century. As Zygmunt Bauman

says:

In the vast realm of the academy there is ample room for all sorts of

specialized pursuits, and the way such pursuits have been historically

institutionalized renders them virtually immune to pressures untranslatable

into the variables of their own inner systems; such pursuits have their own

momentum; their dynamics subject to internal logic only, they produce what

they are capable of producing, rather than what is required or asked ofthem;

showing their own, internally administered measures of success as their

legitimation, they may go on reproducing themselves indefinitely. (qt. in

Joyce 80) 11

Ifwe take Bauman's words literally, it seems as ifpostmodemism will never stand a chance of penetrating the inner ring of mainstream historiography, for the two operate on different, incompatible systems of processing knowledge. As long as future historians continue to be trained by present historians, historians will keep insisting that with more evidence, they can arrive at increasingly more accurate pictures of the past and express them in nearly transparent language. Education seems to replicate the epistemological basis for each discipline. However, the possibility exists (and I think history shows) that epistemologies occasionally evolve into different ways of knowing. With today's increasingly accepted interdisciplinary pursuits, the chances that epistemologies will cross and produce new ways for determining what counts as knowledge will multiply. While the tendency for systems of knowing to become field-specific certainly explains why historians have been cautious of postmodemism, it does not pronounce definitively that the two will always be incompatible.

As in the case of the discipline ofhistory, postmodemism has had few serious takers in the discipline of philosophy, probably because philosophy believes postmodemism would wipe it out. 3 "[O]f all the various areas of the humanities," Zagorin claims, "philosophy is the discipline in which postmodemism has made the fewest inroads and gained the fewest converts" ("History" 4). Zagorin has used postmodemism's poor reception amongst

American philosophers to buttress his opinion that the theory is bad for the practice of history. Ironically, however, his claim seems to affirm the postmodemist idea of discursive communities that decide what their version of the truth is. While Zagorin believes that literary theorists and some fringe historical theorists are bad philosophers because they accept postmodemism while the philosophical discipline does not, this serves to show that disciplines tend to have their own epistemological hegemonies and are therefore entitled to 12 socially construct their disciplinary knowledge. Of course, by this same argument, rhetoric and other fields currently influenced by postmodemism should leave history alone. It is likely that ifpostmodemism is to play a significant role in historiography, a more collective approach to knowledge irrespective of disciplinary boundaries will first have to be operating.

Historians Believe That Postmodernism is Just One of the Many Approaches to History

Some historians do not reject postmodemism per se; what they do object to, however, are postmodernists who believe that theirs is the only way to construct an accurate history. A good case could be made that the discipline of history is not generally opposed to postmodemism when postmodemism merely regards itself as one way among many of assessing history. In fact, postmodemism has entered the debate among historians on how to do historiography as a number of recent articles in History and Theory suggests.4 Eley and

Nield point out that historians "have been giving [postmodemist] issues some thought" and further insist that the discipline of history supports a pluralism of approaches to historical inquiry and historiography (356). Moreover, they, like several other historical theorists who are generally opposed to postmodemism, believe that postmodemism could have positive effects on historical practice when taken in bits and pieces. In reflecting on the proper relationship between historiography and postmodemism, they remind historians and postmodemists alike that postmodemism, just like any other theory, does not have to be

"swallowed" whole by the discipline of history (358).

Roberts, a good example of a historian who has embraced postmodemism but not at the expense of getting rid of more traditional approaches, argues for "nuance and differentiation" in historiography, as this results in the "productive tension within the 13

Western tradition" (391). Perhaps more historians would be open to postmodem ideas if

postmodemism were not attempting to have a totalizing effect by declaring any historical

account that has the ring of objectivity (i.e., a narrative) a bad one. After all, according to

Eley and Nield, "[T]here is a pre-existing pluralism of practices and discussion ... , which

cannot be disposed of simply by pronouncing the truths of the new" (356). Postmodemism, because it threatens to wipe out old scholarship and methods, is therefore viewed as menacing by most historians.

Historians Assume that Their Discipline is Threatened by Postmodernism

Because postmodemism objects to renditions of history that have the pretense of being objective, it would be potentially threatening to past accounts ofhistory, which-with the exception of those accounts that functioned as propaganda-almost always attempted to be objective. At least, most accounts employed an objective tone. In a reaction to the modem, the postmodem mindset jeopardizes previous historical writing that is deemed

"insufficiently self-conscious about its own presuppositions and procedures" (Eley and Nield

361 ). On the other hand, Eley and Nield argue that some of these modem historical accounts

are the fruit of good scholarship and therefore should not be cast aside merely because they

do not square with the prevailing "anti-positivism" (361).

In responding to the postmodemist tendency to ignore Western history because of its

close association with the linear model and purpose of history from the Christian tradition

and the inheritance ofthe myth of progress from the Enlightenment, Roberts insists that

forgetting our past would be dangerous. In fact, Roberts does this by appealing directly to

the postmodemists: ----~----~ ------

We cannot be reflexive without grasping the sense in which we belong to the

Western intellectual tradition, which continues in our present discussion. [ ... ]

It is not so bad-and it forecloses nothing-to recognize that we

belong to a Western intellectual tradition and that we continue/it continues us

as we respond. To overreact and insist on rupture instead is to limit our

possibilities for both self-understanding and critical response. (398)

Eley, Nield, and Roberts all voice concern that postmodernism, carried to its extreme,

would seek to eradicate past historical accounts and with them, the sense of history that has

made historians who they are today. Roberts calls for a "more productive relationship with

our past," something that postmodernism can only do if it accepts the Western-based,

objective-toned accounts that past historians left as their progeny. Postmodernists do not

have to accept these texts uncritically, but if they are perceived as ignoring or negating these

accounts, postmodernism will never gain a large acceptance in the field ofhistory.

Historians Think Postmodernists Exaggerate the Opaqueness of Texts

When confronted with the charge that their accounts presume a false objectivity, most

traditional historians argue that they know their narratives to be highly tentative; they are not

by any means dogmatic arguments about their conceptions of history. However, traditional

historians see texts (written or otherwise) as being substantially more transparent than their

postmodernist counterparts do. The same goes for their interpretations of evidence.

Traditional historians believe that evidence is much more straightforward, lending itself to a

common-sensical interpretation, than the postmodernists do. This might be the reason for the

use of the objective tone in most historical texts, especially since the historian is less likely to 15 believe than the postmodemist that he or she has cause to be self-reflexive in his or her historical narrative.

Of course, this difference of opinion about the opacity/transparency of texts (or evidence) has created some of the most major rifts between mainstream historiography and postmodemism. While historians acknowledge that texts are not completely transparent,

Lorenz says that this

does not lead to the favorite conclusion of postmodemists that language is

'opaque' and not capable of corresponding to and referring to reality, but to

the much more 'realistic' conclusion that reference and correspondence must

be interpreted as relative and internal to specific conceptual frameworks ...

(qtd. in Zammito 343)

Lorenz objects to what he sees as the either-or fallacy of postmodemism, that if a text is not transparent, it must be opaque (314). However, as can be explained by the way that history is epistemologically different from the disciplines that have embraced postmodemism, historians believe that evidence can be reconstructed into likely accounts, which are by no means permanent. Common sense can aid the historian to the point where he or she is fairly certain that event x happened and it in tum caused event y to occur, but the historian knows that this knowledge is never fully unimpeachable. By trying to convince historians that both their evidence and the texts they produce are opaque, postmodemists insult the epistemology that is integral to the historical discipline; if historians were to accept that their texts were opaque, nothing smaller than a revolution would occur; history would be forever changed.

Therefore, it is at least understandable why historians are a bit reluctant to take seriously the claims of postmodemism and apply them to their practice. 16

Moreover, the postmodemist's claim that texts are opaque and that narrative accounts of history, by introducing the element of human interpretation, do not accurately represent the past, seems a bit hypocritical to the traditional historian. To claim this, the postmodemist is assuming that he or she knows the accurate picture of the past to recognize that the narrative produced by the historian does not match it completely. This makes the postmodemist an empiricist (an ironic charge that many historians bring against postmodemists), as Zammito writes:

[Ankersmit] writes: "history is often shown or interpreted in terms of what has

no demonstrable counterpart in the actual past itself." The notion of

"demonstrable counterpart" has all to much the ring of logical empiricism

the search for some discretely observable phenomenon-about it. (344)

Of course, as long as the postmodemists agree that they have no idea whether or not historical accounts accurately reflect the past or not, they can argue inductively that since historians' interpretations ofhistory can be demonstrated to be subjective (based on the amount of evidence available at the time and the presuppositions that color these interpretations), it is likely that those accounts do not accurately reflect the past, although those accounts may still be useful. If Zammito is right and the historical discipline is not threatened by interpretation but rather knows that its claims are constructed from the available evidence (cf. 339), then historians should not object to agreeing that while their accounts are not completely opaque, they are not as transparent as they commonly presume.

However, there are still many historians who reject postmodemism on the basis that they believe that it is possible to write objective accounts and moreover, even if it is not, it is still more beneficial than harmful that historical accounts have a pretense of objectivity. J. C. 17

D. Clark, in his comparison of recent American and British historiography, writes, "Conflicts between modernists and post-modernists have revealed a surprising loyalty to objectivist understandings of historical truth" and surmises that this might serve an American civic purpose (795). However, this relates to another objection to postmodernism by historians: if it is widely acknowledged that all historical accounts are subjective, they say, then what forces will prevent history from being written as a propagandistic tool? (Roberts 395). Of course, the postmodernist would retort that historical accounts are already propaganda; by purporting to be objective, they are all the more ominous.

Historians Consider Postmodernism to be Depressing

Finally, some of the historical discipline's rejection ofpostmodernism is an emotional response based on misunderstandings and popular articulations of the theory. In some senses, postmodernism seems depressing and nihilistic, signaling the end of history. If modernism was largely characterized by the myth of progress, then post-modernism connotes the end of progress, which can only mean stagnation and apathy towards the discovery of new knowledge. Zagorin notes that some historians believe postmodernism to be "a new kind of nihilism threatening the very existence ofhistory as an intellectual discipline, and ... tend to regard themselves as a beleaguered minority defending the citadel of reason against its hordes of enemies" ("History" 3). Such is the case for thinkers across the political spectrum; both liberals and conservatives have reacted strongly against postmodernism.

Zagorin, noting that the postmodern is "sometimes also thought of as synonymous with that of a posthistorical age" ("History" 6), admits that historians, in their rejection of postmodernism, might have been influenced by common perceptions of it owing partly to its 18 historical moniker. He writes, "[P]ostmodemism, as its name implies, carries with it strong connotations of decline, exhaustion, and of being at the end rather than the commencement of an era" ("Historiography" 264).

***

Now that I have outlined some historians' objections to postrnodemism, I would like to correct what I perceive to be their misconceptions about the unpopular theory as well as use their valid objections to refine the way in which I will use postmodemism to explore a historical issue centered on two separate U.S. Supreme Court rulings for 1919 cases concerning the freedom of speech. However, before I do that, I would like to look in more depth at the thought of two scholars who spent a good deal of their professional careers engaged in theorizing about historiography: R. G. Collingwood and Hayden White.

Although Collingwood's thought is acceptable to more historians than White's, the two have a lot in common, especially as they contemplate how the imagination plays into the creation of narrative accounts ofhistory. Eventually, by showing the parallels between Collingwood and White's thought on historiography, I hope to show that mainstream historians do not need to be alarmist about White's proposals for the writing of history. 19

CHAPTER 2: THE HISTORICAL IMAGINATION: R. G. COLLINGWOOD'S ANTICIPATION OF "POSTMODERN" HISTORIOGRAPHY

The scholarship of Oxford philosopher R. G. Collingwood (1889-1943), sometimes considered the father of the philosophy ofhistory, perhaps represents the extent to which the mainstream of the history discipline is willing to embrace postmodemism. Interest in

Collingwood, who is accepted by traditional historians as a brilliant archaeologist of Roman

Britain, whose ideas on the philosophy of history are tolerated by historians because he was

"one of them" and was knowledgeable of the methods of practicing historians, has grown in the last decade. Some even go as far as to label Collingwood's ideas "almost 'postmodem."'

For example, David Bates writes:

Certainly, his profound contributions to narrative analysis, his sophisticated

historicist position, his "deconstruction" of historical practice, and his original

ideas on the intimate link between 'evidence' and questions, put him at the

forefront of that twentieth-century intellectual move away from questions

about the meaning ofhistory, to studies on how historians create meaning,

how the past is actually put together within concrete historical circumstances.

(32)

Yet, just as most historians have rejected postmodemism, they have also mostly ignored Collingwood's ideas about the philosophy of history, even while his posthumously published collection of essays on historiography, The Idea ofHistory, is considered a modem classic. As Joseph M. Levine suggests, part of this undervaluing of Collingwood on the part ofhistorians might be due to the cloistered and unpublished status of many of his writings

(86); since 1978, when his manuscripts were placed in the Bodleian Library, and 1994, with ------~-~-~------~------

the republishing of The Idea ofHistory along with some previously unpublished papers,

interest in Collingwood has resurged, even among "traditional" historians.

Although he never uses the term "postmodem," Christopher Parker, in his recent look

into modem British historiography, implies that Collingwood anticipated a postmodemist

approach to the philosophy of history. However, Collingwood's epistemological views

cannot be neatly categorized as either modernist or postmodemist. While Collingwood hints

in his writing that truth is contextually based, there are several places in his Idea ofHistory

that indicate Collingwood would not be comfortable accepting a postmodem view of truth.

Rather, Collingwood's thought forms an intermediate position between the certainty of

positivism and the relativity of scepticism. His methodology for historical inquiry was

revolutionary in the sense that he sought to abandon logical positivism and assert that the

questions one asks ofhistory are as important as the answers.

In somewhat of a contradictory fashion, Collingwood appears to accept ideas that

would be labeled today as both modernist and postmodemist. James Patrick writes, "Austin

Farrer ... was puzzled by The Idea ofHistory because Collingwood seemed to assert that

thought makes history, then to stress alternatively the similarities between human thought in

all ages and the ability of thought to change the world" (99). However, if Farrer had

understood that Collingwood held both essentialist and non-essentialist notions in tension, he

might not have been confused. Unlike today's New Historicists, Collingwood believed that

there was something universal about human nature; unlike the positivists of his day, he also

believed human events to be unique and unpredictable. Either to assume that human history

followed scientific laws or that it was completely unknowable was, for Collingwood, to

commit an error of extremism. Some things could be absolute while others relative; not 21 everything had to be one way or the other. His Idea ofHistory consistently affirms an epistemological position that falls between positivism and scepticism:

It may be argued that history is not knowledge at all, but only opinion, and

unworthy of philosophical study. Or it may be argued that, so far as it is

knowledge, its problems are those of knowledge in general, and call for no

special treatment. For myself, I cannot accept either defence. If history is

opinion, why should philosophy on that account ignore it? If it is knowledge,

why should philosophers not study its methods with the same attention that

they give to the very methods of science? And when I read the works of even

the greatest contemporary and recent English philosophers, ... I find myself

constantly haunted by the thought that their accounts of knowledge, based as

they seem to be primarily on the study of perception and of scientific thinking,

not only ignore historical thinking but are actually inconsistent with there

being such a thing. (Idea 233)

Because he fought so hard against positivism (which still seems to rule today in the form of nomological theory or "covering law" models in historiography), it is appropriate for me to show how Collingwood anticipates a postmodem approach to historiography. However, because Collingwood is not a full-blown postmodernist, I will point out examples in his writing where he exemplifies foundationalist underpinnings. While I will rely on the scholarship of others who have grasped Collingwood's thought in more breadth than I have, I will mainly focus on two sections of the Epilegomena from Collingwood's Idea ofHistory: section two, "The Historical Imagination," and section four, "History as Re-enactment of

Past Experience." First, I will begin by giving a brief overview of Collingwood's -~- ---~~ -~ ------

22 methodology; then, I will explain how those methods can be said to anticipate a postmodernist approach to historiography; next, I will call attention to some of

Collingwood's modernist assumptions; and finally, I will draw some conclusions about the implications of Collingwood's thought on developing a more postmodern approach to historiography that takes into account the uneasiness that historians have concerning postmodernism.

Collingwood's Methodology

"As works of imagination," wrote Collingwood, "the historian's work and the novelist's do not differ. Where they do differ is that the historian's picture is meant to be true" (Idea 246). The foundation for Collingwood's historical method, therefore, was the belief that history exists only in an ephemeral sense; all we can know about history is what has been recorded and remembered. This leads to his most recognized tenet: "All history is the history of thought" (215), or put alternatively, "Of everything other than thought, there can be no history" (304 ). The reason why history is bound up in human thought is because history only exists as memory; because history does not exist in the present, it is not something that can be examined by empirical means. Moreover, because history cannot be studied empirically, the only way it can be thought about is imaginatively, as Collingwood wrote:

Freed from its dependence on fixed points supplied from without, the

historian's picture of the past is thus in every detail an imaginary picture, and

its necessity is at every point the necessity of the a priori imagination.

Whatever goes into it, goes into it not because his imagination passively ------~-~~~------

accepts it, but because it actively demands it. (245)

Because people can only "know" history if they perceive it with their imaginations, it then follows that the only way to gain historical knowledge is by thinking the thoughts of others in history. This idea of re-thinking the thoughts of the past was Collingwood's main contribution to the philosophical study of history; it was, for him, the only way to know the past. Thus he writes, "[T]he re-enactment of past thought is not a pre-condition of historical knowledge, but an integral element in it ... " (290).

Collingwood, because he assumed that written texts were more or less accurate records of thought, equated this re-enactment with mentally following the arguments written in these texts. While we can never know a writer's emotions, physical sensations, or even psychological state, we can know his or her thoughts through the written record (Idea 296).

Collingwood believed that thought re-enactment was possible because although our present thoughts influence our interpretation of our memories, we can still sort out our thoughts and know the difference between the thoughts we had in the past and the thoughts we have now.

If we can know our own past thoughts, Collingwood reasoned that we should be able to know the past thoughts of others. Therefore, he wrote:

Ifthe autobiographer, although from the point ofview of simple recollection

his past thoughts are inextricably confused with his present ones, can

disentangle them with the help of evidence, and decide that he must have

thought in certain ways although at first he did not remember doing so, the

historian, by using evidence of the same general kind, can recover the

thoughts of others; coming to think them now even if he never thought them

before, and knowing this activity as the re-enactment of what those men once 24

thought. (Idea 296)

Collingwood never recognized the problem of knowing whether or not one is discerning the author's intention in a text except to say that those who embrace doubts about actually knowing the author's thoughts are unnecessarily solipsistic.

Even though Collingwood believed that the past could only be known by rethinking the thoughts of others, he envisioned that these past thoughts would be rethought in light of current thought. In other words, the past is never dead (because it is never really "living") but instead is created by present constructions of it: "Every present has a past of its own, and any imaginative reconstruction ofthe past aims at reconstructing the past of this present"

(Idea 24 7). Here, Collingwood suggested that history is relative to the present, and because he believed in this historical relativity, part ofhis historical methodology involved the historian asking questions of the text that were appropriate to his or her current circumstances. Because new evidence is always resurfacing (and other evidence being lost) and the ways by which evidence is interpreted are constantly evolving (not necessarily for the better), "every new generation must rewrite history in its own way; every new historian, not content with giving new answers to new questions, must revise the questions themselves ... "

(248).

Collingwood also had a method for synthesizing the information gained from asking suitable questions of a text. Like Richard Rorty (perhaps Collingwood was a source for

Rorty's ideas about epistemology), Collingwood believed knowledge to be web-like; that is, knowledge could be formulated only by drawing connections between pieces of evidence

(functioning as pegs or "nodal points"). Because history cannot be empirically apprehended, the historian was guided by his or her a priori imagination to see connections between these 25 units of evidence (Idea 242). Of course, what this set of evidence looked like would be determined by the historian working from a specific point in history. Additionally, rather than do what Collingwood termed "scissors-and-paste" history, that is, merely use evidence handed down by "authorities," he suggested that the historian should be responsible for his or her own evidence. "We know that the truth is to be had, not by swallowing what our authorities tell us, but by criticizing it; and thus the supposedly fixed points between which the historical imagination spins its web are not given to use ready made, they must be achieved by critical thinking" (243).

What kind of "critical thinking" was Collingwood calling for? If the sciences can be said to rely on empiricism to formulate scientific knowledge, then it appears that

Collingwood advocated relying on intuition and personal experience-and not on past authorities-to construct historical knowledge. He writes:

It is thus the historian's picture of the past, the product of his own a priori

imagination, that has to justify the sources used in its construction. These

sources are sources, that is to say, credence is given to them, only because

they are in this way justified. For any source may be tainted: this writer

prejudiced, that misinformed; this inscription misread by a bad epigraphist,

that blundered by a careless stonemason; this potsherd placed out of its

context by an incompetent excavator, that by a blameless rabbit. The critical

historian has to discover and correct all those and many other kinds of

falsification. He does it, and can only do it, by considering whether the

picture of the past to which the evidence leads him is a coherent and

continuous picture, one which makes sense. The a priori imagination which 26

does the work of historical construction supplies the means of historical

criticism as well. (Idea 245)

According to Collingwood, the way that the historian could discern truth from error was by examining how well each piece of evidence fit in with his or her coherent and non contradictory web of historical knowledge. Therefore, the ''whole perceptible world" could be evidence for the historian (247); Collingwood's standard was whether or not the potential

"fact" squared with the rest ofthe historian's experience and expertise. It is now appropriate for us to look at how Collingwood's historical methodology represents a "pre-postmodern" approach to historiography.

Collingwood's "Pre-Postmodern" Influences on Historiography

There are several ways in which Collingwood's historiography answers the concerns that postmodernists have about the way most historians write history today. First,

Collingwood was against what we now call the nomological approach to history, or the notion that history could be analyzed to discover "covering laws"5 that could be used to explain historical change. The second way in which Collingwood was a precursor to postmodern approaches to historiography was by embracing an epistemology that gave credence to non-empirical ways of discerning "truth." Finally, Collingwood stressed that knowledge-.at least the historical variety-is socially constructed, and he freely admitted to the historicity of interpretations of history. Our present thoughts influence our perceptions of the past, and each generation should ask different questions of the historical evidence questions that are tailored to suit timely needs.

The distinctions that I am making between Collingwood's anti-positivism, pre------~------

postmodemist epistemology, and tendency to see knowledge as socially constructed are

somewhat artificial because the ideas that I have grouped into these three categories are

highly contingent on each other. Collingwood was anti-positivist precisely because he

valued ways of knowing that presented alternatives to the prevailing scientism; because his

epistemology informed him about the historical nature of knowledge of history, he is

considered by some thinkers to be a constructivist. Therefore, in no way should these three

categories that I am using to systematize Collingwood's pre-postmodem ideas be thought of

as cut and dried entities.

Collingwood's Anti-Positivism and Reaction against the "Realists"

Collingwood's most obvious similarity with postmodemism is his reaction against

logical positivism, or the move to see history in purely scientific terms. According to Parker,

Collingwood's "hostility to positivism became almost obsessive and distorted his own

interpretation of the history ofhistoriography and ofthe philosophy ofhistory" (165). Yet,

Collingwood was primarily reacting to the practice of using the methods of natural science to

study historical phenomena. In his Autobiography, Collingwood wrote that the lack of

suitable methods with which to approach history represented a "gap" in philosophy.

However, he writes that his

'realist' friends, when [Collingwood] said this to them, replied that there was

no gap at all; that their theory of knowledge was a theory of knowledge, not a

theory of this kind ofknowledge or that kind ofknowledge; that certainly it

applied to 'scientific' knowledge, but equally to historical knowledge or any

other kind [one] liked to name; and that it was foolish to think that one kind of 28

knowledge could need a special epistemological study all to itself.

(Autobiography 85)

In part because Collingwood recognized that the scientific method was not the best way to inquire about historical matters, he was at odds with the realists. James Patrick provides a good summary of realist thought:

The realists considered knowledge, or the act of knowing, to be essentially

objective, and sought persistently to rescue metaphysics and ethics for the

implicitly personal, and hence implicitly psychological, moral and theological

context in which both had been taught at Oxford. Truth was a fact or logical

proposition, duty an obligation born of circumstance or context, religion and

art emotions. (86)

The realists thought that all knowledge could be grasped by scientific means. They assumed that history followed regular, universal laws that, once discovered, could be used to predict historical outcomes. However, Collingwood believed there to be a difference between the substance that could be properly studied through a scientific approach and the material that the historian examines:

[T]he things about which the historian reasons are not abstract but concrete,

not universal but individual, not indifferent to space and time but having a

where and a when of their own, though the where need not be here and the

when cannot be made to square with theories according to which the object of

knowledge is abstract and changeless, a logical entity towards which the

minds may take up various attitudes. (Idea 234)

Instead of being something that could be objectively perceived by a commonly agreed upon ------~------

29 standard (like, for example, the boiling point of water at sea-level), history, to Collingwood, was "a logical entity" that could only be viewed from the unique perspective of the individual's imagination. Because it was impossible to empirically study a subject that had passed from present existence (Idea 282), all that was left were the historians' a priori ideas of history. As Collingwood wrote, '"the historian does not find his evidence but makes it, and makes it inside his own head. "'6 According to Peter Johnson, another way in which

Collingwood diverged from the ways of the realists was in his insistence of the necessity of language to knowledge; "in Collingwood's judgement, realism is blind to the extent to which the very possibility of thinking depends upon the possession of a shared stock of concepts, in other words, a common vocabulary" (5).

In a manner that prefigures the way certain humanistic disciplines today decry the scientistic belief that scientific knowledge is foundational, Collingwood was put offby historians who claimed their work passed the tests of "'scientific rigour"' (qtd. in Parker

175). For one thing, Collingwood knew that it was impossible for the work of a historian to be completely objective because it was colored by the historian's own preconceived assumptions about the subject. "We remember, he said, what we want to remember, not

'what happened'; we perceive 'what we attend to,' not what is there; 'we reconstruct history not as it was but as we choose to think it was."'7 He especially disliked the work ofthose who wrote textbook history because textbooks framed history as a set of facts rather than

"'an inexhaustible fountain of problems"' (qtd. in Parker 204).

Collingwood's Epistemology

Because Collingwood did not believe that all truths could be apprehended by 30 scientific inquiry, he anticipated the epistemological revolution that would stem from the work of later thinkers like Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn. As we have seen, because history is not something that exists in the present, Collingwood believed that it could not be studied scientifically. Discovering historical truth, therefore, could not be the fruit of a positivistic enterprise.

Instead, historical knowledge had to be apprehended by the imagination, and the imagination, after intuitively prioritizing the evidence, was guided by hunches and tacit knowledge gained through experience to construct a coherent narrative---essentially a system of belief. Sociologists today might call this system a "plausibility structure," others might coin it a "worldview" or a "set of presuppositions," and still others refer to it as a "cultural myth or narrative." It is Collingwood's ability to see himself-and the positivists-in the context of such a system that makes his ideas ahead of his time. Patrick is right when he says:

Perhaps it would be correct to say that, for Collingwood, there was a sense in

which every scientific or historical fact is known by faith with respect to its

participation in these fundamental presuppositions that render it knowable to

all, and known by reason insofar as that fact testifies in its finite relations and

characteristics to the accuracy and intelligibility of those fundamental

supposals or presuppositions. (97)

Here, Patrick is suggesting that Collingwood claimed that science, just like any other way of knowing, rested ultimately on faith in a set of "fundamental presuppositions." Patrick also argues that Collingwood, being a religious person, believed by faith in truths that could not be apprehended by reason (82-3). Because he believed in the transcendent, a spiritual reality 31 not easily recognized by humans, Collingwood was open to highly intuitive ways of knowing truth; as was fashionable among some academics at the time, he was mildly interested in extrasensory perception (Bates 35). While his religious faith gave him cause to reject logical positivism, the result of this rejection was that Collingwood was open to consider epistemologies alternative to the positivism that prevailed at Oxford.

Instead of believing that every area of inquiry should be approached by science, as the realists argued, Collingwood thought that there was a particular "way of knowing" that best suited the subject under study. In fact, although it makes him seem a little like a nomologicalist, Collingwood saw epistemology-different kinds of epistemology specifically-as something that had evolved over human history. "With a surely very strange echo of Comte," writes Parker,

Collingwood argued that, like the individual mind, mankind seemed to be

progressing through phases of intellectual activity, starting with art, then

going on to religion, then science, then history, and finally philosophy. Each

was an advance on the one before as with Paleolithic art, Neolithic religion,

Greek science, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, and most recently

philosophy, which, as Kant had said, had only just begun. This was very

schematic; and he professed that these five forms of knowledge were only

provisional; yet he had a scheme ofhistory relating to them (170).

Perhaps Collingwood did not mean for this scheme to imply that human thought was always progressing; rather, he was merely discerning a pattern in the development of epistemologies, a historical pattern, he argued, that had happened to result in epistemologies in ascending complexity as time went on. At the same time, by his detection of this progressive pattern, it ------

32 is evident that Collingwood was partially under the influence of the modernists of his time.

However, he stood mainly in opposition to these modernists; Collingwood thought that the positivists still operated under the old Enlightenment way of knowing-an epistemology that was fitting for the study of science, but not for history. He likely identified his own epistemology with the epistemology of philosophy and saw it as the proper way of inquiring after history. However, most historians of his day were still using the "historical"

(Enlightenment) way of knowing, and they "failed to resolve the dilemma of how they could really know [historical facts], for the historians' vaunted objectivity hid their subjective selectivity; history and philosophy, therefore, had to merge so that the historians could truly understand their role" (Parker 177). Collingwood's prescription for the role ofthe historian in determining historical knowledge will be explored in the next section.

Collingwood's Method and Social Construction

As I said before in my discussion of Collingwood's methods, one ofthe most important factors in his methodology was the realization that "[e ]very present has a past of its own" (Idea 247). Although Collingwood believed that the past had an ultimate existence apart from human thought about it, he recognized that present understandings of the past were largely constructed by contemporary intellectual thought. "This is not an argument for historical scepticism," wrote Collingwood (248). For Collingwood, ultimate Truth did exist, although humans could never quite attain a complete knowledge of it. For example, when writing about the act of reconstructing the past, Collingwood stated: "In principle the aim of any such act is to use the entire perceptible here-and-now as evidence for the entire past through whose process it has come into being. In practice, this aim can never be achieved" 33

(247). According to Parker, "That still left him, as he put it, 'in some perplexity as to the purpose ofhistory,' ifwe could never arrive at the truth" (179). However, since

Collingwood did in fact continue to study history, he probably saw some immediate social value in constructing narratives of the past; he did say once that "the purpose of history is to grasp the present."8

Today, rhetoricians and postmodemists would probably refer to the idea that historical accounts change with the times as "social constructionism" because it acknowledges the historical and cultural situation of the historian. Likewise for

Collingwood, the acknowledgement of ever-changing histories led to the idea that historical knowledge is contingent upon the historian's perception of data. Although Collingwood would say that certain historical narratives are better than others (because of how well they corresponded to the context they served), he did not believe that there was one way of viewing historical data that held for all time. Johnson refers to this anti-foundationalist strain in Collingwood's thought as "strikingly modem" (lll

Because all writers of historical accounts are historically situated, the historian needs to be aware of his or her own perspective, if only so that history can be written in contemporary terms. "[T]he historian himself, together with the here-and-now which forms the total body of evidence to him, is a part ofthe process he is studying, has his own place in that process, and can see it only from the point of view which at this present moment he accepts within it" (Idea 248). This idea that scholars are unable to approach their material of study from an objective viewpoint shows that Collingwood's thought was very much ahead ofits time.

Moreover, Collingwood did not agree with most modem historians when it came to 34 the selection of evidence. He claimed that "there are for historical thought no fixed points thus given; in other words, ... in history, just as there are properly speaking no authorities, so there are properly speaking no data" (Idea 243). Because nothing could be taken as "given," it was up to individual historians to decide what "nodal points" were important to the webs of their historical accounts. Of course, it is likely that individual historians would be shaped by their academic climates, cultures, and places in the larger scheme of history. However, it seems that for Collingwood, personal history was as important as collective history: "even a single historian, working at a single subject for a certain length oftime, finds when he tries to reopen an old question that the question has changed" (248). Because Collingwood saw history as something that must continually be revisited, Collingwood would likely have objected to the idea of writing a universal historical account that could instruct all times and peoples. Every culture, every generation, even every individual had to keep rewriting history to serve its constantly changing perceptions of the world.

Moreover, Parker points out that Collingwood acknowledged that writing history was only possible when one did not have all of the evidence. "Ancient history is history,' he said, because we know so little. Contemporary history was 'unwritable' because we know so much and because we have not yet digested what we know. Knowledge of contemporary history is 'too unconnected, too atomic"' (175). Collingwood believed history to be a human invention made possible only by neglecting (or forgetting) a sufficient amount of historical evidence. Parker suggests that these ideas show "a dangerously high level of relativism"

(175), and perhaps this is why Collingwood's ideas, at heart, are unpalatable to most historians. 35

Anti-Postmodern Trends in Collingwood's Method

While some aspects of Collingwood's historical method anticipate the application of postmodernism to historiography, perhaps his methodology can still be relevant to the work of most historians because there are several foundationalist assumptions that undergird it.

First, Collingwood assumes that the "idea ofhistory" is an innate idea in the Cartesian sense; he argues that every person has a sense of history. Additionally, Collingwood does not see any potential hermeneutical problems in following the written arguments of others; moreover, it seems as if all texts are to be approached in the same way. It will be helpful to explore each of these foundationalist assumptions in further detail.

Universal Idea ofHistory

Although Collingwood rightly points out that the work of the historian is never done

(because the questions he or she asks keep changing with the times), and although he asserts that the historian "can never say that his picture of the past is at any point adequate to his idea of what it ought to be" (Idea 249), he maintains that historical inquiry could only be done via the historical imagination. "But, however fragmentary and faulty the results of his work may be, the idea which governed its course is clear, rational, and universal. It is the idea of the historical imagination as a self-dependent, self determining, and self-justifying form of thought" (249). Unfortunately, Collingwood does not give sufficient reason as to why the historical imagination is "self-dependent, self-determining, and self-justifying," although he does give ample defense why one cannot know history except through the imagination. According to Collingwood, the historian's use of his or her imagination is "not ornamental but structural" (241 ); it does not merely aid the historian in creating beautiful ------~~~

36 prose, but actually assists him or her in arriving at historical material to write about. If history exists only in thought, then the only way to access it is through the imagination.

However, my main concern here is not Collingwood's assertion that the imagination is necessary to the study of history-indeed it is-but his claim that the "idea of history" is

"clear, rational, and universal." Perhaps using "the idea of history" as the criterion for historical truth would be practical if that idea were specifically situated for a given culture

(e.g., a Christian idea ofhistory is vastly different from an Hindu one), but Collingwood shows that he believes that this idea to be universal. He continues:

That idea [ofhistory] is, in Cartesian language, innate; in Kantian language, a

priori. It is not a chance product of psychological causes; it is an idea which

every man possesses as part of the furniture of his mind, and discovers himself

to possess in so far as he becomes conscious of what it is to have a mind.

Like other ideas of the same sort, it is one to which no fact of experience

exactly corresponds. (Idea 248)

Of course, New Historicists would cringe at Collingwood's use of the phrase "the furniture of every man's mind." Even if intuitive ideas (i.e., ideas "which no fact of experience exactly corresponds") adequately describe reality, Collingwood's suggestion that some intuitions are present in "every man" betrays his persistent foundationalism. Collingwood does not even explain what he means by his "idea of history" because he assumes that as it is an innate idea; his reader supposedly already knows what it is. However, as for the idea of history being an innate one, there is no concrete proof that all humans have a sense of history and/or change in time; in fact, Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob argue that even one's perception of time is largely conditional on social and technological factors. 10 37

However, when we explore the reasons why Collingwood cast the historical imagination as a universal concept, it becomes possible to understand his foundationalist claims. Collingwood wrote:

Evidence is evidence only when some one contemplates it historically.

Otherwise it is merely perceived fact, historically dumb. It follows that

historical knowledge can only grow out of historical knowledge, in other

words, that historical thinking is an original and fundamental activity of the

human mind, or, as Descartes might have said, that the idea of the past is an

'innate' idea. (Idea 247)

Because the past must be thought about in its historicity, the historical imagination is a

"fundamental activity" of the mind; Collingwood's reaction to the positivists, who were trying to perceive history as a set of "facts" that could be uncovered by empirical study, led him to insist that the idea that evidence can only be interpreted in light of the present was a universal phenomenon. In other words, Collingwood was insisting upon the relativity of historical reconstruction based on present conceptions of the past.

Texts are Transparent and are Qualitatively the Same

Another way in which Collingwood's writings demonstrate that he held some foundationalist beliefs is that they reveal the optimism with which he believed one could know the meaning of an historical text. Although he made a distinction between historical and "merely philological knowledge" (Idea 283), Collingwood really seemed to believe that the historian could accurately think the thoughts of others.

However, postmodemists have several problems with this. First, language is not 38 inherently transparent, and the meaning that an author of a text is trying to convey might not be the same meaning that the reader is receiving. In addition to the usual problems of hermeneutics, even if the historian discerns the author's meaning correctly, according to

Collingwood, "Merely reading the words and being able to translate them does not amount to knowing their historical significance" (Idea 283). While this statement could be accepted by postmodernists and historians alike, Collingwood suggests that historians discover this significance by "envisaging [the text] just as [the author] envisaged it" (283). Unfortunately, the only way Collingwood gives as to how this feat can be accomplished is by pretending

"[the author's] situation were [the historian's] own, [and seeing] how such a situation might be dealt with; he must see the possible alternatives, and the reasons for choosing one rather than another; and thus he must go through the process which the [author] went through in deciding on this particular course" (283). However, the only way for the historian to detect the author's motives in such a case, then, is by assuming that they are congruent with the historian's own. While this would work if human nature were uniform (then human behavior might also be predictable), because people act in radically different ways for reasons that go beyond measurable factors, it is not really possible to say that one has determined another's thoughts merely by reading a text he or she has produced and imagining oneself in the same situation.

To be fair to Collingwood, I am compelled to give his rebuttal of a similar objection to my own. When confronting the idea that we can never know for sure what another is thinking, he writes:

... this appears a satisfactory account of historical thought only to persons who

embrace the fundamental error of making for history that form of pseudo- 39

history which Croce has called "philological history": persons who think that

history is nothing more than scholarship or learning, and would assign to the

historian the self-contradictory task of discovering (for example) "what Plato

thought" without inquiring "whether it is true." (Idea 299-300).

This excerpt from The Idea ofHistory is puzzling because it seems to fly in the face of some ofhis other ideas, for example, Collingwood's insistence that the questions historians should ask ofhistorical evidence will necessarily change.

However, perhaps Collingwood's main concern here was the linking of knowledge and practice-he appears to have been intellectually captivated by the concept, writing in the opening sentence of Speculum Mentis, "All thought exists for the sake of action." Although not everything could be known in its entirety, to Collingwood it was only ethical that that which could be known be put to use. According to Johnson, for Collingwood, "The 'big' problem [of learning] was how to find a satisfactory 'rapprochment' (A, p.77), between philosophy, history and practice" (4). Perhaps Collingwood thought that merely the illusion that one was thinking the thoughts of others could produce a type of knowledge that could be benevolently applied to help humankind. Parker also stresses that he "had a conviction that intellectual activity was supposed to make a difference, that it was not just an intellectual game, and ought to relate to life" (168).

Yet another problem that postmodemists would detect in Collingwood's historical methodology relates to the observation that not all historical texts are set up as arguments to be followed; therefore, to assume that there is one method (i.e., following the logic of the author's thoughts) with which to approach all texts is unfounded. This is especially ironic since Collingwood himself felt the frustration when others insisted that he use a 40

scientifically-inspired methodology for the study of history. Even if one admits that Euclid's

thoughts-as long as what one means by those thoughts is the sequence of logic involved

with the proof that the two angles are equal---can be reasonably followed and, therefore,

rethought, what if the document under examination is a diary, a letter, or even a declaration

of war? How is it possible to rethink another's thoughts unless the writer systematically

guides the reader through them in a detailed manner? Although every written document can

be viewed as an argument for something, that document might obscure the author's motivations behind the writing; in that case, we could never know what the author was

thinking; we might not even know where to begin, particularly if we know little about the

context of the document.

To be fair, I should mention that Collingwood did not think that the historian's reenactment of the past was a complete one; Parker believes that Collingwood meant that

"because we are not that original person in that original circumstance, we cannot share the

emotions that accompanied that scientific discovery or that military victory. The only

emotion we feel is that ofhistorical discovery" (186). Also, rethinking another's thoughts

does not mean, according to Collingwood, reliving the past in its original identity. In an oft

quoted passage, he admits, "We shall never know how the flowers smelt in the garden of

Epicurus, or how Nietzsche felt the wind in his hair as he walked on the mountains; we

cannot relive the triumph of Archimedes or the bitterness ofMarius" (Idea 296). However,

Collingwood continues this thought and like a positivist asserts," ... but the evidence ofwhat

these men thought is in our hands; and in re-creating these thoughts in our own minds by

interpretation of that evidence we can know, so far as there is any knowledge, that the

thoughts we create were theirs" (296). 41

From this passage, it appears that Collingwood endowed "thought" with the characteristics not only of logic and reason but also with universality. True, we could never know the emotions or the experiences of the author of a text, but we could know his or her thought, if only because it followed the same patterns that our thoughts do. However, this is clearly evidence of Collingwood's underlying essentialism, and while his ideas about history existing only as a product of the a priori imagination might seem valid, his belief that historians can accurately re-think the thoughts of others poses problems for the postmodernist.

* * *

In the above discussion of the thought ofR. G. Collingwood, I hope that I have shown how the thought of this Oxford philosopher was historically more advanced than the scientific positivism that guided the historiography of his time and yet cannot be fully thought of as "postmodernist." Because Collingwood was perched between modernist and postmodernist thought, his ideas provide a logical mediation point for historians of a more traditional bent and rhetoricians who are concerned about the false pretenses of objectivity that historians tend to operate on. Just as Collingwood longed for a "rapproachment" between history and philosophy, his ideas might form the basis for a rapproachment between history and rhetoric, two disciplines that have epistemologies that are currently at odds with one another. 42

CHAPTER 3: THE LITERARY IMAGINATION: HAYDEN WHITE'S "POSTMODERN" HISTORIOGRAPHY AND COMPARISON WITH COLLINGWOOD

In my view, history as a discipline is in bad shape today because it has lost

sight of its origins in the literary imagination. In the interest of appearing

scientific and objective, it has repressed and denied to itself its own greatest

source of strength and renewal. By drawing historiography back once more to

an intimate connection with its literary basis, we should not only be putting

ourselves on guard against merely ideological distortions; we should be by

way of arriving at that "theory" of history without which it cannot pass for a

"discipline" at all. (H. White, Tropics 99)

If Collingwood believed that history consisted ofthe historian's narrative of it,

Hayden White was quick to point out that one should never confuse narratives with history.

Yet, ironically, these two thinkers shared much in common in their conceptions ofhistory.

Collingwood stressed that history-as a set of actual events-was something that could never be studied directly, and therefore "history" was merely how humans decided to write up those events. White developed Collingwood's first idea and said that because we could never communicate those events in an objective manner if we used narrative, it was wrong to think of those events as being congruous with what had been written about them in story form. White himself said that his

conception of historiography bears a number of striking resemblances to those

ofNorthrop Frye and the lateR. G. Collingwood. Both of these thinkers 43

analyze the element of "construct" in historical representation, the extent to

which the historian must necessarily "interpret" the "data" given him by the

historical record in order to provide something like an "explanation" of it. (57)

White struggled (and still does) during his academic career to get historians to realize that by writing historical narratives, they are imbuing events with meaning and essentially participating in an enterprise that varies little from the novelist's. However, this is hardly a new insight; we heard this before from Collingwood: "As works of imagination, the historian's work and the novelist's do not differ" (Idea 246).

It is frequently pointed out that traditional historians are inimical to White's ideas, but surprisingly, these same historians claim to like Collingwood. However, there is a continuity between the ideas of Collingwood and White that should not be ignored. Perhaps the similarity in their thoughts stems from the influence that Giambattista Vico and Benedetto

Croce had on both ofthem-both Collingwood and White can be thought of as the direct heirs of the thought of these two Italian philosophers. In this chapter, after providing an overview of White's contributions to historiography, I hope to show that White's ideas share a peculiar resemblance to Collingwood's, although the former thought that the latter did no go far enough when it came to stressing that events do not come to the historian laden with meaning (H. White, Tropics 84).

Specifically, I will examine two of White's essays from his collection Tropics of

Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism, "The Burden of History" and "The Historical Text as Literary Artifact." RichardT. Vann notes that these are two of White's most cited works

(144), and they provide ample entree into White's historiographic theories. While many scholars have concluded that White's thought is highly inconsistent with itself, so too is the 44 interpretation of White; nearly everyone gives a different "reading" of him. Although most scholars (particularly those from the history discipline) familiar with White characterize him as a postmodernist, some have been as savvy as to point out that he is more of a structuralist, or at least that he shows some foundationalist assumptions and is very taken with formalist literary theory. At any rate, I consider these two essays of White's to be representative of his thought, and it is particularly fitting to look at these pieces because many the ideas contained within them have caused traditional historians to dismiss White.

White's Major Contributions to Historiography

Before I delineate the similarities between the thought of Collingwood and White, it would be best for me to summarize White's contributions to the philosophy ofhistoriography as much as it is possible to encapsulate these ideas. 11 V ann writes, "Extracting from him--or imposing upon him-a systematic philosophy of history is impossible, and it may seem that he is only ushering the flies into new fly-bottles. His forte is fecundity, not fixity, of thought" (161). Yet, one must start somewhere, and it serves my purpose to discuss several themes that I discern in White's writings: (1) the inherent meaninglessness of past events; (2) the historian's "emplotment" of those events into one ofFrye's archetypal plots: romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire; (3) the historian's use ofliterary tropes (metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony) to describe those events; (4) the evaluation ofhistorical accounts on the basis of internal consistency with the historian's purpose; (5) the belief that historical knowledge should be useful to the present concerns of society and the academy; and (6) an ultimate appeal to move away from narrativity in constructing the past. Except for White's

suggestion that the historian find other ways of communicating the past other than by using ------~--- ~--

narrative, each of the other themes can be traced back to similar ideas expounded by

Collingwood. Therefore, White's ideas should not be regarded as incredibly revolutionary;

his writings are a reaction against the nineteenth-century realist historians for the same

reasons that Collingwood's were. If White's thought can be said to be a development beyond

Collingwood's, it is because White acknowledged the subjectivity of narrative and, unlike

Collingwood, he was not fully comfortable with it. For White, an ideal historical account would be objective, which is why he considers narrative accounts to be less than perfect.

The Meaninglessness ofthe Past

Narratives, because they endow past events with meaning, can never be true accounts

of history since they add something to it. White believed that historical events did not have

any inherent meaning; rather, their meaning, or interpretation, was bestowed on them by the

historian. This is part of the reason why the same event can have different meanings for various peoples and times, as obviously the dropping of the atomic bomb means something

different to the Japanese than it does to the Americans. "[N]o historical event is intrinsically

tragic .... For in history what is tragic from one perspective is comic from another" (H.

White, Tropics 84).

Because events do not have intrinsic meaning, it follows that narratives-written

accounts that show the relationships between events-do not exist in nature either. White

writes, "[T]here has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most

manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the

forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have

with those in the sciences" (Tropics 82). Meaning is a social construct given to detached ---~~------~-~~-~------

elements, and historians, whether they know it or not, give the past meaning when they tum

events it into a story. In an echo of Collingwood, White writes,

The events are made into a story by the suppression of certain of them and the

highlighting of others, by characterization, motif repetition, variation of tone

and point of view, alternatives descriptive strategies and the like-in short, all

of the techniques that we would normally expect to find in the emplotment of

a novel or play (84).

Many historians and philosophers of history, including Noel Carroll, have criticized

White's assertion that stories do not exist in nature by pointing out that the events in

individual lives can be said to constitute stories. Against White's premise that "We do not

live stories even if we give our lives meaning by retrospectively casting them in the form of

stories" (90), Carroll contests that people often plan the series of events in their lives and

then go about living them according to the script (143). However, Carroll neglects to see that

if it were possible to predict accurately events that eventually transpire, it is still by act of

interpretation that we impose a story on these events before the fact. It does not matter if this

story is given to the events before or after they occur; a story still represents a human

construct that has been added to events.

A more sound criticism to White's claim that past events are meaningless apart from

human interpretation of them (besides the idea that they could be given meaning by God, an

idea that Carroll rejects but nonetheless points out on p. 148) is that events could be said to

have an inherent meaning found in their causal relationships with other events. While the

dropping of the bomb has disparate meanings for people living in Japan and America, the

events that ensued because of the bombing are universal because they occurred regardless of 47 human interpretation of them. In a sense, then, the bombing meant that other events would thus occur. One could argue that an account that merely showed the causal relationship between a series of events would constitute a story (because it shows events in a chronological fashion) and yet be untainted by the meaning that humans confer upon those events. Unfortunately, such an argument presupposes that causal relationships between events are easy to detect; also, it ignores the fact that one event may trigger several, innumerable and immeasurable events. Therefore, even when the historian attempts to show the causal relationships between two or more events, he or she is still imposing an interpretation upon them by (1) arguing that they indeed share a causal bond and (2)

"subordinat[ing] certain of them and ... highlighting others" (H. White, Tropics 84).

Since events do not have meaning apart from the meaning given to them by human constructions of a series of events (for meaning is also conferred upon history when the historian selects the beginning and the ending events in an account), White contends that the way historians give meaning to history is by aligning events into one of the generic plot structures.

Emplotment: Framing Events into Romance, Comedy, Tragedy, and Satire

If White thinks that the historian is the responsible agent for "emplotment"--or giving events their meaning, he also believes that there are a limited number of plot structures from which historians can choose: those that are predetermined by their culture.

By "emplotment," White means "simply the encodation of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures, in precisely the way that Frye has suggested is the case with 'fictions' in general" (Tropics 83). White believes that the plot 48 structures catalogued by Frye (romance, comedy, tragedy, and satire) are genres that people in Western societies readily recognize and use to construct meaning. White claims, "The historical narrative thus mediates between the events reported in it on the one side and pregeneric plot structures conventionally used in our culture to endow unfamiliar events and situations with meanings, on the other" (Tropics 88).

If we are to analyze seriously what White's ideas mean for the writing of history, the four Fryean plot structures deserve to be defined in detail. In The Harper Handbook to

Literature, of which Frye is an editor, romance is described in broad terms as "a continuous narrative in which the emphasis is on what happens in the plot, rather than on what is reflected from ordinary life or experience" (401). Although it is obvious that most literary romances have some kind of love story, it should not be forgotten that romances frequently concern adventure or a threat that must be overcome by the hero. Eventually, the hero succeeds and ends up together with the heroine at the "end," which is never really the end because there still exists the potential for more adventure. In U.S. history, many accounts of the western expansion were written as romances, with settlers exploring the unknown land and facing possible danger from the American Indians. The ideal of"Manifest Destiny," with America claiming the land between both oceans, was the obvious end to this romance, although once this ideal was achieved, more adventures in "taming" the land were sure to play out.

Frye's definition of comedy is one that has two sides: "one an absurd reversal of the normal order, the other pragmatically more sensible" (110). Although comedy can either be absurd or realistic, its typical plot structure involves an underdog hero who wants to marry a woman who is his social superior. A comical, charismatic villain tries to keep them apart, 49 but to no avail once "[a] mystery ofbirth, affecting either hero or heroine,[ ... ] bring[s] about the comic resolution" (111).

Tragedy, according to Frye, is "a serious FICTION involving the downfall of a hero or heroine" (465). There are three main themes evident in a tragedy: (1) isolation of the main character from the rest of the community, (2) violation and revenge, and (3) a tragic flaw or obsessive passion ( 466).

Finally, satire is defined by Frye as "[l]iterature that ridicules vices and follies" (413), but he also points out that satire "now means [ ... ] a tone of antagonism between the writer and the material which may be found in any genre" (414). Closely related to satire is irony, which Sheridan Baker, Frye's co-editor, generally considers to be "the perception of a clash between seems and is, or between ought and is" (250). Baker also sheds light on the interrelation ofFrye's plot structures:

In Anatomy ofCriticism (1957), Northop Frye sees Irony as one ofthe four

archetypal mythoi, or ways, in which we perceive the world and its works.

Irony, or SATIRE, is the polar opposite of ROMANCE, the wry realities opposite

the wishful dream, just as TRAGEDY is the opposite of COMEDY. If we think of

a circle, with Romance at the top and Irony at the bottom, Tragedy at the right

and Comedy at the left, we can see how the four modes blend. The arcs of

Romance and Irony have their tragic or comic tinges at one end or the other.

(252)

While White believed that Frye's "pregeneric plot structures" provide historians with guidelines on how to construct the meaning of events, events themselves do not dictate themselves into one plot archetype over the others. "Historical situations are not inherently 50 tragic, comic, or romantic," writes White. "They may all be inherently ironic, but they need not be emplotted that way" (Tropics 85).

There is some question as to whether White should have also included "epic" in his list ofthe standard plot structures, and indeed he even makes mention of this genre in one of his lists of the structures. However, the issue of whether or not to include "epic" as an archetypal structure poses a more serious criticism: why does White believe that there are only four or five plots that the historian has to choose from when relaying a series of events?

To the true postmodemist, this problem seems to align White with the formalists. Later,

White added "pastoral" and "farce" to the list ofemplotment structures (Vann 160), but it seems as if White's work would be better served not by focusing on the nomenclature and use of these structures as ways of classifying plots but by asserting that the historian applies an emplotment structure to a series of events when he or she transforms it into a narrative.

However, it does not matter what kind of plot structure is employed by the writer of history;

White's main point is still not lost: without a structure that gives events meaning, narrativity is impossible.

The Four Tropics: Metaphor, Metonymy, Synecdoche, and Irony

White posits that it is possible that historians do not recognize that their narratives are humanly constructed rather than found in the relationships between events because of the way that historical events are described or rendered in their minds prior to their writing of narratives (Tropics 94). Just as there are four (at least in his original conception) emplotment structures that can be used to illustrate the relationships between events, White gives four ways of describing events: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. These four ~~~~--~~~~~~~~~~~~------

51 descriptive techniques (tropes or tropics) are taken from Vico, who merely reproduced "a

Renaissance tradition in reducing the figures of speech to four" (Domanska 177). White calls these the "four principle modes of representation" and partly defends their use in history by something he heard Geoffrey Hartman say at a conference: that writing history meant placing events in their contexts, or relating a part (event) to a whole (context). "[Hartman] went on to suggest that as far as he knew, there were only two ways of relating parts to wholes, by metonymy and by synecdoche" (Tropics 94). This triggered in White a remembrance ofVico's tropes, and he concluded that because history "has not yet become disciplinized to the point of constructing a formal terminological system for describing its objects" (95), the historian had to use one of these tropes when describing an event.

What Constitutes a Good Historical Narrative

For White, a good historical account was one that did not purport to be universal.

Writing that an account should "be judged solely in terms of the richness of its metaphors,"

White continues,

Thus envisaged, the governing metaphor of an historical account could be

treated as a heuristic rule which self-consciously eliminates certain kinds of

data from consideration as evidence. The historian operating under such a

conception could thus be viewed as one who, like the modem artist and

scientist, seeks to exploit a certain perspective on the world that does not

pretend to exhaust description or analysis of all of the data in the entire

phenomenal field but rather offers itself as one way among many of disclosing

certain aspects of the field. (Tropics 46) 52

White is arguing here that the historian should give up all attempts to construct an objective account of the past. Even if the historian knows that his or her account cannot be objective, it is unfair to the reader if the historian represents history in a form that confers the illusion of objectivity upon the narrative. However, if the historian admits to his or her readers the ways in which his or her views on a subject are limited, then the historian will gain more credibility, and the account will be "one way among many" of representing the truth. For

White, historical accounts should be appraised in the same manner that art is; he points out that we do not have to decide which painting-Cezanne's or Constable's-is "'more correct"' (Tropics 46). Lest anyone accuse White ofbeing a relativist, he argues:

The result of this attitude is not relativism but the recognition that the style

chosen by the artist to represent either an inner or outer experience carries

with it, on the one hand, specific criteria for determining when a given

representation is internally consistent and, on the other, provides a system of

translation which allows the viewer to link the image with the thing

represented on specific levels of objectification. (46-7)

White seems to be implying that when the historian writes in a certain method of emplotment, his or her readers will recognize that genre and thus be able to interpret the information the historian gives them in light of that genre. For example, when a Japanese historian is describing the dropping of the atomic bomb in terms of a tragedy, the reader can realize that this is merely one reading of the event-an event that surely has a tragic side, but also one that can be interpreted as bringing about the end of a war and thus possibly saving more lives. 53

Giving History Its Meaning Back

In "The Burden of History," White gives a history of how the discipline of history has come to be despised by the other academic disciplines, using as his evidence novels like those by Ibsen, Eliot, and Camus that have portrayed historians as having a morbid fascination with the past and failing to see the benefit that such historical knowledge could bring to the present. White claims that unlike the other areas of academic inquiry, history never evolved beyond its early nineteenth century stage-its golden age. Rather, "historians, for whatever reason, had become locked into conceptions of art and science which both artists and scientists had progressively to abandon if they were to understand the changing world of internal and external perceptions offered to them by the historical process itself'

(Tropics 42). Pointing out that history sees itself as situated midway between art and science, White argues that it failed to adopt the continually metamorphosing theories of either art or science and now operates without a theory other than one that combines a romantic notion of art with a positivistic view of science. Moreover, the "theory" or methodology that the discipline ofhistory operates under is not very substantive:

After all, historians have conventionally maintained that neither a specific

methodology nor a special intellectual equipment is required for the study of

history. What is usually called the "training" of the historian consists for the

most part of study in a few languages, journeyman work in the archives, and

the performance of a few exercises to acquaint him with standard reference

works and journals in his field. For the rest, a general experience ofhuman

affairs, reading in peripheral fields, self-discipline, and Sitzfleisch are all that

are necessary. Anyone can master the requirements fairly easily. (40) 55 sees no value in knowing the past for its own sake. Thus he says, "The contemporary historian has to establish the value of the study of the past, not as an end in itself, but as a way of providing perspectives on the present that contribute to the solution of problems peculiar to our own time" (Tropics 41). White merely wants historians to use the opportunities their discipline affords them for productive and benevolent purposes:

The methodological ambiguity of history offers opportunities for creative

comment on past and present that no other discipline enjoys. If historians

were to seize the opportunities thus offered, they might in time convince their

colleagues in other fields of intellectual and expressive endeavor ofthe falsity

ofNietzsche's claim that history is "a costly and superflous [sic] luxury ofthe

understanding." ( 48)

Moving Beyond Narrative

Although some scholars claim that White stressed the value of narrative in communicating history,12 ultimately this is a faulty conclusion that should not be drawn merely because White focused so much of his work on narrative. In actuality, White was working to show that narrative could never represent accurate history because it always added a human dimension to it. Contrary to the charges of some of his critics, White believed that past events were real, 13 and his definition of"history" diverges from Collingwood's in that history was comprised of these real events. For White, the problem with narrative was that it gave meaning to these events, and thus it ceased to portray reality. In The Content of the Form, White asked, "Is narrativity itself an ideological instrument?" (81 ). While White does not directly answer that question himself, he seems to imply that in some cases, at least, 56 it is.

Therefore, White's ideal was history in a non-narrative form. Vann draws attention to White's idea of a narrativeless historical account mentioned briefly in The Content ofthe

Form. According to Vann, it '"seem[ed] plausible"' to White to "refus[e] to attempt a narrativist mode for the representation ofits-history's?-truth" (160). Rather, White encouraged the historian to "reconceiv[ e] conventional notions of time so that, for example, events can be seen not as successive episodes of a story, but as random occurrences" (160-

61). He hinted that this approach to history would result in the "historical sublime":

If [ ... ] it is possible to imagine a conception of history that would signal its

resistance to the bourgeois ideology ofrealism by its refusal to attempt a

narrativist mode for the representation of its truth, is it possible that this

refusal itself signals a recovery of the historical sublime that bourgeois

historiography repressed in the process of its disciplinization? And if this is

or might be the case, is this recovery of the historical sublime a necessary

precondition for the production of a historiography of the sort that

Chateaubriand conceived to be desirable in times of"abjection"? A

historiography "charged with avenging the people"? This seems plausible to

me. (Content 81 ).

However, perhaps because White knew that he would be going too far to suggest that historians give up their techniques of telling stories to record the past, he believed that narrative could be redeemed if historians would only be aware of-and admit to the reader the fictitious spin they were adding to historical accounts by constructing them as narratives.

At the same time, an ideal historical account would not use narrative-which, for the 57 historian, usually took on the flavor of an early 19th century novel-at all.

In "The Burden of History," White praises Jacob Burckhardt for his attempt to tell the past without putting it in story form. White notes that Burckhardt, refusing to adhere to the old historiographical methods that had stagnated in the discipline of history, experimented with the artistic techniques of his day to produce a unique perspective on his subject-a perspective not tied down by chronological conventions. White writes:

[O]nce he was freed from the limitations of the "storytelling" technique, he

was liberated from the necessity of construction a "plot" with heroes, villains,

and chorus, as the conventional historian is always driven to do. Since he

possessed the courage to use a metaphor constructed out of his own immediate

experience, Burckhardt was able to see things in the life of the fifteenth

century that no one had seen with a similar clarity before him. Even those

conventional historians who find him wrong in his facts grant to his work the

title of a classic. What most fail to see, however, is that in praising

Burckhardt they often condemn their own rigid commitment to conceptions of

science and art which Burckhardt himself had transcended. (Tropics 45)

Narratives, insofar as they blinded the historian from seeing the subjectivity of his or her own historical account, were not benign in White's opinion. Moreover, they tended to give the reader the impression that there was no narrator-thus making accounts of the past seem to be impartial and accurate reflections of the past.

So that narratives would lose their illusory effect of objectivity, White advocated writing in what he called the "middle voice." In English, we usually speak oflanguage as either being in the active or passive voice, but Greek adds to this distinction a middle voice. ---~ ~---~ --

F. R. Ankersmit describes the middle voice as "'elousamen,' meaning "I wash myself," which is therefore indeed somewhere midway between the active 'I wash' and the passive 'I am washed"' (189). It is only in this middle voice that White believed history can be accurately represented because the middle voice eliminates the notions of objectivity and subjectivity: the object and the subject of the sentence are the same. So what does writing in the middle voice look like? Ankersmit mentions Roland Barthes' s idea of "I write myself," in which the author discovers his or her true self only through the act of writing (190). To this, Ankersmit adds, "Especially ifwe think of the monologue interieur, that hallmark of the modernist novel, we will see that this literary device destroys all clear boundaries between subject and object, between the self and what is outside the self' (190).

Because so many consider him to be a postmodernist, it is ironic that White actually

believes that the representation of history achieved through abandoning narrative constructs

can be an objective one. As Vann points out, just as it would be inappropriate to narrate the

events of the Holocaust in either a pastoral or comic emplotment, White thought it would be

best to give up on narrative in order to portray a realistic account of the facts (160). Vann

says the White believes this could be done

if it is a modernist realism employing a "middle voice" (neither active or

passive), and requiring a narrative without a narrator of objective facts, not

taking any viewpoint outside the events it describes, exhibiting a tone of doubt

about the interpretation of events seemingly described, open to a wide variety

of literary devices (like interior monologues) and reconceiving conventional

notions of time so that, for example, events can be seen not as successive

episodes of a story, but as random occurrences. (160-1) 59

While this type of historical account would be fascinating to observe if only because it would share a lot of qualities with modern art, I disagree with White that such a "narratorless" narrative would be objective. Portraying events as random occurrences is a type of interpretation forced upon history, just as portraying them as a coherent pattern would be.

No one really knows whether or not the events in history have a meaning; what we can know is that humans, when they write history, attribute a meaning to the events they witness or encounter from other historical accounts. Saying that these events do not have meaning, however, is to endow them with an anti-meaning-and yet this is still an interpretation.

Contrary to Hayden White's hypothesis that if one can free oneself from narrative one can write objective history, historians will always be forced to write from positions of subjectivity. 14

Comparison of White and Collingwood

Nancy Partner argues that "[m]ore than any other theorist," White "has brought historians to acknowledge the relevance of literary critical concepts and rhetoric to their work and has given the linguistic medium of history an intellectual visibility it never had before"

(167). However, Collingwood also recognized that the work of the historian was ultimately literary. Partner also suggests, "The constructedness of narrative and the principle of selection that inform all historical explanation are taken-for-granted notions these days and that is largely [White's] doing" (167-8). However, Collingwood pointed out long before

White that historians had to make selections about what to include in their narratives, and he also stressed that asking different questions of the evidence would yield different accounts.

Moreover, Collingwood advocated asking different questions ofthe historical evidence; he 60

Table 1. A Comparison of Some Ideas of Collingwood and White

Collingwood White

Nature of The historian's and novelist's The historian's work has Historical Writing work do not differ except the literary implications. historian's writing is supposed to be true.

Narrative as Constructions ofhistory differ Constructions of history differ Constructed depending on what questions depending on what is are brought to the evidence. emphasized/subordinated by the historian.

How to overcome The problem of The problem of objectivity/ objectivity/subjectivity is objectivity/subjectivity is subjectivity confronted by re-thinking the addressed by using the middle problems thoughts of others. voice (thinking one's own thoughts in the form of an interior monologue)

Nomological Against discovering "laws" that Against discovering "laws" that Theory govern history, but there seems govern history, but there seems to still be a discernible pattern to to still be a discernible pattern events: epistemic progress; this to events: transition between pattern is linear and progressive. Vico's tropes give rise to new ages; this pattern is cyclical.

Definition of "History" consists ofthe human "History" consists of real events "History" interpretation of past events; uninterpreted; "history" cannot "history" is the narrative. be described in narrative form. 61

believed that each generation should rewrite history for itself.

In many ways, then, the ideas that have shown up in White's writings are not new

ones to the discipline of history; they are merely ideas that have reached a larger audience during his lifetime than Collingwood's ideas did. Therefore, White has had the opportunity to develop into the controversial figure that Collingwood was not. Table 1 outlines some

areas in which White's ideas can be seen as an extension ofCollingwoodian thought. While

I have hinted at the similarities between the thought of Collingwood and White throughout

the chapter, I would like to take each of these six catagories of ideas represented in Table 1

and explain in more detail why I see Collingwood and White as essentially sharing the same

conception of historiography.

Nature ofHistorical Writing

Although many credit White with articulating that writing history is essentially a

literary enterprise, this notion was put forth at least thirty years earlier by Collingwood. In

The Idea ofHistory, Collingwood frequently draws parallels between the historian and the

novelist:

Each of them makes it his business to construct a picture which is partly a

narrative of events, partly a description of situations, exhibition of motives,

analysis of characters. Each aims at making his picture a coherent whole,

where every character and every situation is so bound up with the rest that this

character in this situation cannot but act this way, and we cannot imagine him

as acting otherwise. The novel and the history must both of them make sense;

nothing is admissible in either except what is necessary, and the judge of this 62

necessity is in both cases the imagination. Both the novel and the history are

self-explanatory, self-justifying, the product of an autonomous or self

authorizing activity; and in both cases this activity is the a priori imagination.

(245-46)

To be entirely honest, although Collingwood saw these similarities between the historian and the novelist, he did give three reasons why their work was different: (1) the historian's account must take place in a real place and time, (2) the historical account had to be consistent with the other accounts of history the historian accepted, and (3) the historical account needed to be informed by existing evidence. However, this differentiation between the work of the historian and the novelist is not something that White would disagree with

Collingwood about. Despite the charges of some of his critics, White believed in real events, and does not advocate that historians represent these events as occurring in a fictitious place and time. Also, White would have certainly subscribed to the idea that a historian's written historical accounts should not contradict other accounts that he or she holds to. Although each account could only give a certain perspective on reality, White advocated coherence within this perspective. Finally, it is likely that a historical account not based on evidence would cease to fall under the domain of history for White. While he praised Burckhardt's non-narrative accounts despite the fact that they contain inaccuracies, it is clear that these inaccuracies are not elements that White desired.

Narratives as Constructed

Just as Collingwood tended to see historical accounts as being comprised of connections between nodal points (events), so too was White's conception ofhistorical 63 narrative based on the idea that a story was the result of the historian placing emphasis on certain events and incorporating them into a coherent whole. In fact, the thought of both historians can be represented in a way true to their writings by the models shown in Figure 1.

B e a B--E\ a d H cI ------H f g

Historical Narrative # 1 · Historical Narrative #2

Figure 1. Historical Narrative Models

Both Collingwood and White viewed the historical narrative as something that had been constructed by the historians after they selected their evidence (which both pointed out was not "given"-each piece of evidence had to be weighed on its own by the historian). In both of the diagrams above, the letters represent events (or what Collingwood called "nodal points"). For hypothetical historical narratives #1 and #2, I have used the lower case letters to denote the nodal points that do not play a role in the historical account and capital letters to symbolize the evidence (or events) that the historian has chosen to focus on. The lines that link the capital letters signify that the historian has shown, in his or her historical account, relationships between the events that these letters stand for. For example, in historical narrative #1, only events B, C, E, and Hare deemed relevant by the author. Moreover, the historian of this particular account is showing a causal relationship between nodal point B 64 and points C and E; events C and E, in turn, have a causal relationship with event H. In historical narrative #2, the historian has chosen to focus only on events B, G, and H, showing that event G caused events Band H. If we follow Collingwood's injunction to ask different questions of the evidence (evidence here is being represented by a, b, c, ... g), it follows that different accounts would be constructed when nodal points A, D, and Fare included. This is part of the reason why White acknowledged that historical narrative could never give a true picture of reality; real history was merely description-as soon as relationships between events started coming into play, the historian's account ceased to be history and began to be interpretation.

White was also displeased by what Collingwood called "scissors and paste" history.

In an echo of Collingwood, White writes, "Many historians continue to treat their 'facts' as though they were 'given' and refuse to recognize, unlike most scientists, that they are not so much found as constructed by the kinds of questions which the investigator asks of the phenomena before him" ( 43). In the above diagram, whether nodal point "a" should be understood as "A" or "a" is something that is left for the historian to decide, but he or she should realize that certain questions will prompt the evidence to be read as "A" rather than

"a." Collingwood concurs with this notion, saying:

The evidence available for solving any given problem changes with every

change of historical method and with every variation in the competence of

historians. The principles by which this evidence is interpreted change too;

since the interpreting of evidence is a task to which a man must bring

everything he knows: historical knowledge, knowledge of nature and man,

mathematical knowledge, philosophical knowledge; and not knowledge only, 65

but mental habits and possessions of every kind: and none of these is

unchanging. (Idea 248)

For Collingwood, a permanent historical account could never be written because people's ways of apprehending historical evidence would always be in flux. In this manner, both he and White acknowledge that narratives are temporal human constructs of historic events.

How to Overcome Objectivity/Subjectivity Problems

While Collingwood saw the destruction of the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity when one re-thought the thoughts of others, White overcame this barrier by proposing that the historian write in the middle voice, using sentences in which the narrator was simultaneously both subject and object. Both thinkers, however, were highly conscious of the problem of human subjectivity when conveying history objectively was the historian's goal. Admittedly, White takes this a step further than Collingwood, if only because

Collingwood appeared to be more interested in showing the artificial differentiation between subjectivity and objectivity than in actually attempting to escape subjectivity altogether.

While Collingwood stressed that scholarship could never be purely objective because the researcher would always be a part of the research, he was not alarmed by this subjectivity.

White, on the other hand, seemed to suggest that once narrative is abandoned, something that approaches an objective view ofhistory can be obtained. Although each man reached different solutions ofhow to overcome problems relating to the impossibility of pure objectivity, that they both spent great efforts investigating these problems at all suggests that they might have shared a common intellectual influence. 66

Nomological Theory

Actually, both Collingwood and White shared an intellectual heritage from Vico and

Croce, and both men drew from Vico's pattern of the evolution ofhistory to come up with nomological theories of their own. One would not expect that Collingwood, who was at odds with the logical positivists, would delineate a "covering law" model that explained history.

Yet ironically, he perceived a progressive pattern in history, probably because of his fondness for the thought of Vi co, who first proposed different ascending and cyclical stages or eras of history: poetic, heroic, and human. Because Collingwood saw human history primarily as intellectual history, he believed that each new era of history was ushered in by a change in the epistemological basis for knowledge. Therefore, human knowledge progressed from artistic to religious, from religious to scientific, from scientific to historical, and finally culminated in a philosophical age. Not only did these five stages apply to human history,

Collingwood also believed that individual human intellects developed in this pattern.

Perhaps also because of White's admiration for Vico, he also saw similar patterns in history as writers moved from telling accounts from one emplotment structure to another.

Although Collingwood's model was a linear one, White stayed truer to Vico's model, believing that the shifts in emplotment structures were ultimately cyclical. However, the nomological theories of both men suggest that despite a growing tendency to view them as postmodernists, we must keep in mind that some of their ideas were tenaciously rooted in a much older tradition and actually conflict with postmodern ways of viewing the world.

Definition ofHistory

One of the ways in which Collingwood and White differed was in their definitions of 67 history. Yet it is in their varying definitions that we find that their conceptions of the actual

events of history in relationship to narrative accounts of those events was actually the same.

Although Collingwood considered history to be written accounts of past events and White considered it to be real events in the past, both thinkers knew that events that had happened

could not be accurately portrayed in writing. Moreover, as I stressed before, both men saw historical knowledge as inchoate and web-like. While their conceptions of past events and human grasp of them appear to be the same, each thinker merely assigned the term "history" to different notions that they actually held in common; therefore, the nature of history would not have been a point of disagreement between them.

* * *

In conclusion, the same historians who embraceR. G. Collingwood's philosophy of

history need not be fearful of the ideas of Hayden White, if only because so many of his

ideas run in the same vein as those ofthe former Oxford don's. While all of White's ideas

might not be palatable to traditional historians, this does not excuse their rejection of his

thought merely because it is his. Most of the important concepts that White contributes to

historiography are notions that have their origins in Collingwood, ideas that flowed from

Croce to Collingwood and had an earlier beginning in Vico. If historians had only applied

the historiographical concerns of Collingwood to their work the first time around, perhaps

White would not be the controversial figure in the discipline of history that he is today. 68

CHAPTER 4: APPLICATION: A "POSTMODERNIST" APPROACH TO THE 1919 "SPEECH" CASES

Now that I have examined the objections to postmodemism by traditional historians and looked at the thought of two philosophers ofhistory who offered ideas on how to write history from a "postmodem" viewpoint, I would like to develop a methodology for writing history and test it on a concrete example. Although I am calling my methodology

"postmodem," it is only very loosely so, especially as I wish to acknowledge some of the concerns about postmodernism that are voiced by traditional historians. Moreover, I am seeking to refine and apply the thought of two thinkers who, although they are denigrated as

"postmodemists" at times, cannot be thought of as postmodemists in the purest sense of the word.

I should add that the application of this new methodology is highly experimental; I am testing these ideas against a problem of history to see if they will indeed work when applied to historical narrative. If my methodology derived partially from Collingwood and

White is only modestly successful, I can comment on why this is so and suggest future steps to correct my methodology. The reader should be aware that my methodology represents ways in which the thought of Collingwood and White might be invoked; it is certainly not the only way to apply the ideas of these two thinkers.

My "Postmodernist" Methodology

Drawing heavily from the thought of Collingwood and White, I have come up with the following six principles that I wish to follow when constructing my own historical narrative: 69

1. Start with an epistemological view that is suitable for the study of history.

2. Explore the context that one brings to the body of evidence on one's

subject.

3. Ask questions of the texts under examination that are related to the pressing

concerns of one's time and culture.

4. Given that knowledge is web-like and one's account certainly cannot take

into all factors that were possible influences on the subject, one should try

to admit what one is leaving out of one's narrative.

5. Attempt to discern and point out a "pregeneric" plot structure in one's

narrative; if one cannot, at least make mention of the way that one's

attempt to write a narrative is endowing meaning to the events.

6. Link the historical knowledge in one's account with some sort of practical

application; such a practice would move away from doing history for its

own sake, but use history to serve another purpose.

In this section of my paper, I will offer more detailed description of my six principles. Then, with these principles in mind, I will begin my narrative about the development of the written opinions in two 1919 U.S. Supreme Court cases: Schenck and Abrams. These two cases were part of a series of cases that were later termed the "Speech" cases because they were amongst the first cases that required the Court to consider the meaning behind the freedom of speech clause of the First Amendment. The notable thing about the two cases is that although they were parallel cases decided in the same way, the Supreme Court used different precedents in their written majority opinions for them. Most of the material contained in my narrative is from a seminar paper that I wrote for a course in Cultural Studies; I was attempting to 70 explain the reason why the Court failed to use the "Clear and Present Danger" test in Abrams when they had used it less than a year earlier in Schenck by looking at how the concept of hegemony played into that decision. However, I have revised the paper by taking out the references to Cultural Studies theory (although Cultural Studies undoubtedly has influenced how I have discerned relationships between certain events and not others) and instead focussing on my six principles of my methodology for "postmodemist" historiography.

After the narrative, I will draw some conclusions about how well my six principles worked and what this might mean for the future ofpostmodemism and historiography.

Using an Epistemology or View ofKnowledge Appropriate for History

At the heart of Collingwood's debates with the realists was disagreement over the best epistemological viewpoint from which to study history. The realists wanted to study history using scientific empiricism; Collingwood desired to help develop a different approach to historical inquiry. Regardless of whether one is a positivist or a postmodemist, all would agree that history is unknowable to a degree (whether great or small) by virtue of unreliable and lost evidence, and therefore one should consider writing history with a tone of tentativeness. For example, to show my limited degree of certainty about the nature of the relationship between past events, I could write, "Given that Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., was upset that many people had misinterpreted his written opinion in Schenck, he might have dissented from the Court in Abrams because he wanted a chance to clarify what he meant by

"clear and present danger." Although I am under the assumption that most current historical accounts communicate a degree of uncertainty in their presentations of events anyway, I would make it more of a visible practice. 71

Of course, it seems as if historians and postmodernists misunderstand one another when it comes to representing the "truth." As we saw in Chapter One, both Chris Lorenz and

David D. Roberts believe that history today is represented in provisional ways. It is probable that no historian writes with the belief that his or her account is unimpeachably true. As new evidence emerges and as ways of interpreting that evidence change, so do historical accounts.

This is what Collingwood was trying to show in the age of positivism.

Because postmodernism informs us that there are a plurality of epistemological viewpoints-many of which are equally valid-a good basis for the study of history seems to be one that incorporates a high degree of humility and tentativeness towards the statements one makes. We do not really know what happened in the past; based on the evidence that we have, all we can do is make well-informed guesses about probability. Writers of history do their readers a disservice if they write in a way that obscures this fact.

Describing the Historian 's Context

Just as writing a comprehensive historical account is impossible, so is fully describing the context one writes from, and yet I advocate that it be done because it is better to know a little about a writer's context than nothing at all. Collingwood pointed out that the historian's context is part of his or her study (Idea 248), and White saw context as a major factor that led one to match a plot structure with events (Tropics 85). Before plunging into their historical narratives, historians might explain how they perceive their own contexts-the historical, cultural, social, and personal facets of that context. Also, there will be certain factors influencing historians' interpretations of the evidence that they are blind to; therefore, historians might want to remind their readers that there are inevitable omissions to the 72 historians' own descriptions of their contexts. Even though explaining one's context would be just as problematic as writing history, doing so would be better than assuming a stance as an unbiased observer who can produce an objective account. Moreover, the resulting document might eventually serve as an historical record of how the historians perceived his or her own context and how he or she made the past fit present concems. 15

Asking Questions that are Relevant to the Present

Collingwood's idea that every generation needs to ask different questions of the historical evidence has profound implications for a "postmodem" historiography. When synthesized with his notion that historical knowledge should be useful and applied to the present, this idea becomes very powerful. When approaching a text, the questions that the historian asks of it should fit the needs and concerns of the society that historian serves.

Historians probably do this intuitively (and therefore automatically) today, but it would be better if more conscious thought be given to the questions that a historian asks.

Acknowledging the "Web-Like" Structure ofHistorical Knowledge

If one accepts Collingwood and White's view ofknowledge as "web-like," then conclusions about the relationships between pieces of evidence that are nodal points of the web must be drawn. Because of this, when writing a history, I would try to inform my readers about what pieces of evidence I am foregrounding and what factors I deem to be less important to my account. Of course, it would be impossible to acknowledge all ofthe factors that could potentially be evidence (e.g., does the fact that it was unusually warm in the room where Justice Holmes was writing his dissenting opinion contribute somehow to the ------~ ~ ~----~ ~- ----

73 expressive language that he used?), so even by admitting that I am highlighting certain bits of evidence and considering others irrelevant, I am forced to select what I include in the irrelevant category. At the same time, by pointing out to the reader that historical knowledge is web-like and that my account has certainly not taken everything into consideration, I will not mislead my readers into thinking that my account is objective.

Identifying Plot Structures/Meaning Makers

After composing my narrative, I think it would be a good idea to analyze it and see if a "pregeneric" plot structure, to use White's terminology, is identifiable. If a "pregeneric" plot structure is present, it could be that I am attempting to give the events of the account meaning by using a structure by whose terms I have been enculturated to view the world.

Even if a "pregeneric" plot structure cannot be determined from my narrative, because I am still attempting to make meaning by showing the relationships between events where they might or might not exist, White would want me to make this clear to the reader in some manner.

Linking Historical Knowledge with Practical Benefits

Like Collingwood, I do not think that history should be done for its own sake. At the same time, it is not necessarily the historian's responsibility to make practical use ofhis or her scholarship; that may be done by others. Yet, because White laments that there is little connection between historical inquiry and use of that knowledge by other fields, at least some historians should start putting the knowledge that they gain to use or at least offer suggestions as to what problems in other fields that knowledge can elucidate. For example, 74 showing the disasters caused by Justice Holmes's initial ambiguity in his written opinion for

Schenck could help instruct rhetoricians and writers about the importance of writing as concretely and specifically as possible. Writing that can be broadly interpreted might initially create the illusion that compromise has been successfully reached between various opinions, but this is no substitute for genuine agreement based on similar perceptions of the issues at hand. Such knowledge, derived from the set of historical events that I have retold in the following narrative, could be useful in all sorts of practical arenas such as political science, international relations, business management, and law. 16

Application: "Postmodernist" Historiography and Schenck and Abrams

Narrative: The History ofthe Written Opinions Handed Down by the Supreme Court in

Schenck v. United States and Abrams v. United States

Because both intellectual history and legal history fascinate me, I am going to relate to the reader what I perceive to be the development of the written opinions in two 1919

"Speech" Cases. Specifically, my focus is on the question why the Supreme Court used different legal precedents for the two cases when they were almost identical. I have chosen to look at this particular set of cases because I personally believe that government should not interfere with speech; instead, I think that speech should be regulated by social pressures, and those who transgress speech norms should have the right to become societal outcasts if they would rather face this consequence than the self-censorship of their speech.

Because of my own opinions regarding the freedom of speech, I believe that Schenck and Abrams were decided wrongly, although they did bring about two of the most eloquent judicial opinions that I have ever read, both penned by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. 75

However, Holmes did not always write for the winning side; while he wrote for the majority in the first case, he dissented in the second. Like most judicial historians, I believe that this shift in opinions on Holmes's part was due to regret and personal growth during the time between the cases; however, Holmes claimed that his legal opinion never changed; it was merely differences of severity of the two crimes that led him to decide in a heterogeneous fashion. While the truth can never be fully known, the following is a narrative showing why

I see the evidence pointing in the direction of remorse on Holmes's part.

In Schenck v. United States, a unanimous Court agreed to convict the Socialist appellants for violating the Espionage Act of 1917 because they mailed leaflets to Americans who had been drafted, urging them to stand up for their rights and resist the draft. One of the arguments used in Charles T. Schenck's defense was that the Espionage Act violated his First

Amendment right of freedom of speech. This was the first instance in American history that the Supreme Court had been asked to interpret the free speech clause of the First

Amendment. Holmes wrote the opinion of the court, expressing what came to be known as the "clear and present danger" test:

The question in every case is whether the words are used in such

circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger

that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to

prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. When a nation is at war

many things that might be said in time of peace are such a hindrance to its

effort that their utterance will not be endured so long as men fight and that no

Court could regard them as protected by any constitutional right. (qtd. in

Epstein and Walker 229) 76

In conjunction with the Schenck opinion, Holmes also wrote the opinions of Frohwerk v.

United States and Debs v. United States, companion cases also dealing with anti-sedition laws. In all three cases, the Supreme Court affirmed the rulings ofthe lower courts.

When the 1917 Espionage Act was crafted, the United States was at war. According to John E. Semonche, the Espionage Act was the most "repressive ban on speech" since the

Sedition Act of 1798 (170). The Espionage Act was justified in the minds of most

Americans, who-like their counterparts in Europe-were seized with zealous forms of patriotism and nationalism. If we were to view these events as part of a romantic plot structure, we could emphasize that when President Woodrow Wilson declared war, even the party lines between Democrats and Republicans were essentially destroyed-so intent were politicians in uniting America against Germany. A speech addressed to the Senate on April

4, 1917, by Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge elucidates a common sentiment of the time: "The worst of all wars is a feeble war. War is too awful to be entered upon half heartedly. If we fight at all, we must fight for all we are worth. It must be no weak,

hesitating war. The most merciful war is that which is most vigorously waged and which

comes most quickly to an end" (725). Probably because it threatened to prolong the war,

resistance to the United States' war effort was viewed as not only a challenge to democracy

and capitalism but also as an endangerment to the lives of American soldiers.

In such an environment, it was probably highly unpopular for the Court to overturn

the convictions of Schenck, Frohwerk, and Debs. It might have been impossible to exonerate

Schenck even if the majority ofthe justices had wished to uphold a literal interpretation of

the First Amendment. After all, the Amendment states that "Congress shall make no law ...

abridging the freedom of speech" (emphasis mine). Granted, a sizeable percentage of 77

Americans did not surrender to the rabid patriotism that characterized the spirit of the age.

Zechariah Chafee, Jr., a Harvard law professor who was a champion for free speech, noted at the time that "thoughtful men and journals" objected to the Espionage Act and the restriction of the freedom of speech that it imposed (7). But given the historical context of the aftermath of WWI, when questions of individual rights conflicted with the right of government to protect national security, it is likely that the majority of the nation sided with the government's interest. It is possible that the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court's decision in Schenck because to do otherwise would have diminished the leadership of the

Court.

In Schenck, the Court's decision was unanimous; the opinion issued by the Court accommodated its members' diverse legal reasoning in one singular statement. Even though it was possibly a major factor, the influence of American patriotism only partly determined the Court's ability to reach a unanimous decision in the case. Unanimity was only possible because other factors as well convinced each member of the Court to vote against the appellant. For instance, the Court's most liberal member and one most likely to rule in favor of free speech-Justice Louis Brandeis-probably did not think very deeply about the

Espionage Act's implications on the First Amendment. Later, Brandeis would tell Justice

Felix Frankfurter, "I have never been quite happy about my concurrence in the Debs and

Schenck cases. I had not then thought the issues of freedom of speech out. I thought at the subject, not through it" (qtd. in Cohen 21 ).

Ironically, Justice Holmes, the author of the Schenck decision and the most pivotal justice in the 1919 speech cases, personally did not want to convict Schenck and the others.

However, Holmes opted instead to follow his legal philosophy, which required him to sustain 78 the convictions. Holmes's philosophy of law was very controversial; he was an ultimate pragmatist and positivist who believed that laws needed to be clear so that a transgression of them would bring about a predictable punishment. "Law was not to be understood as politically liberal or conservative, but as a systematic approach that aimed for scientific consistency" (Cohen 61 ). Probably partly because he was an agnostic, Holmes believed that moral arguments should be kept out of the courtroom because they could have no basis in fact and thus would interfere with the predictability of the law (64-65). "Holmes also argued that the law did, and should, adopt a definite policy of requiring only outward conformity"

(Rogat and O'Fallon 1363). To him, laws were prophecies that told people how to act ifthey wanted to avoid certain consequences. The justice once told an audience of law students,

"People want to know under what circumstances and how far they will run the risk of coming against what is so much stronger than themselves" (Cohen 63-64). Holmes believed that bad laws should be corrected, but this was only to be done by the legislature and only after competing social groups had battled until one set ofbeliefs became triumphant (Rogat and

O'Fallon 1367-68). In his book, The Common Law, Holmes wrote, "The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries ... " (5). It appears that he believed that the judiciary had no business in tampering with the nation's development; the courts should only enforce the laws that already exist.

Because he did not think that the Court should override legislation, Holmes was committed to the rule oflaw, which required Schenck's conviction because he had clearly (to

Holmes at least) violated the Espionage Act. While it appears that Holmes thought the

Espionage Act to be bad legislation, his view of legislative law as in a state of constant evolution assured him that Congress would eventually change the law, and, barring that, the 79

President could step in and pardon Schenck and the others.

Additionally, Holmes was led to agree with the majority of the Court in Schenck because he, like Brandeis, probably did not thoroughly consider the implications of the

Espionage Act on the First Amendment. In a letter to a friend dated AprilS, 1919, Holmes admitted that he had "dealt with [free speech] somewhat summarily in ... Schenck v. US."

(Howe, Holmes-Pollock Letters, 7). It appears that Holmes did not consider the speech clause of the First Amendment the major factor in the case. It probably never occurred to

Holmes that he was crafting a weighty opinion that would forever influence how questions of the legal limits of free speech are decided in the United States. "Judging from the Justice's attitude in [the speech case] decisions, moreover, it would almost seem that the reference to

'clear and present danger' in the Schenck case was a casual remark, a bit of neat verbalization on the part of a man given to terse expression" (Konefsky 201).

Immediately after writing the opinions for Schenck, Frohwerk, and Debs, Justice

Holmes seemed to regret his actions. In a letter to Harold J. Laski, a friend and instructor at

Harvard more than fifty years Holmes's junior, dated March 16, 1919, Holmes wrote

I sent you yesterday some opinions in the Debs and other similar cases .... I

greatly regretted having to write them-and (between ourselves) that the

Government pressed them to a hearing. Of course I know that donkeys and

knaves would represent us as concurring in the condemnation of Debs because

he was a dangerous agitator. Of course, too, so far as that is concerned, he

might split his guts without my interfering with him or sanctioning

interference. But on the only questions before us I could not doubt about the

law. The federal judges seem to me (again between ourselves) to have got ------~-··-

hysterical about the war. I should think the President when he gets through

with his present amusements might do some pardoning. (Howe, Holmes-Laski

Letters 142-43)

Two days later, Laski replied with the following:

I read your three opinions with great care; and though I say it with deep regret

they are very convincing. The point, I take it, is that to act otherwise would

be simply to substitute judicial discretion for executive indiscretion with the

presumption of knowledge against you. I think you would agree that none of

the accused ought to have been prosecuted; but since they have been and the

statute is there, the only remedy lies in the field of pardon. Your analogy of a

cry of fire in a theatre is, I think, excellent, though in the remarks you make in

the Schenck case I am not sure that I should not have liked the line to be

drawn a little tighter about executive discretion. The Espionage Act tends to

mean the prosecution of all one's opponents who are unimportant enough not

to arise [sic] public opinion. (143)

In his next letter to Laski more than two weeks later, Holmes does not mention the three

cases any further except to say "a labor union ... yesterday sent me a protest against the Debs

decision, at once cocksure and hopelessly ignorant of all about it" (144). Holmes's

references to Debs in future letters would always be accompanied by an expression that his

opinion in the case (and presumably in Schenck and Frohwerk) had been misunderstood by

both the public in general and especially by proponents of labor and socialism. This

misunderstanding would become a significant factor of his reworking of the "clear and

present danger" test in Abrams as we will eventually see. ------

I must pause here and address the nature of the "clear and present danger" test in

Schenck. Today, this test is applauded by civil libertarians, but in its original context, this test could have functioned as a license for the government to restrict speech according to its own standards of "danger." The test as it stands by itself is ambiguous; Schenck left the courts a lot of room to decide on their own what kinds of speech were protected and what kinds were not. This should not be surprising, given that Schenck arose from a very inchoate discussion of the limits of free speech. The newness of the test probably caused Holmes to ignore it in his Frohwerk and Debs opinions. Samuel J. Konefsky contends that "[a] close look at the paragraph in which Holmes introduces the idea of 'clear and present danger' shows that he was not primarily concerned with propounding a new test of constitutionality"

(192). Justice Frankfurter, a later justice who was well acquainted with Holmes, did not consider "clear and present danger" to be a legal test, but rather a "felicitous" and "literary" phrase (202).

Jeremy Cohen argues that the "impact of the First Amendment was lost in Schenck because Holmes applied the logic of past nonspeech cases to his judicial reasoning. Holmes was unwilling or unable to see the speech component of Schenck as a unique issue" (109).

Cohen further claims that the methodology that Holmes used to derive the "clear and present

danger" test shows that Holmes was more concerned with "criminal law precedent and

generalized principles" than the language of the First Amendment (96). However, it is

probably helpful to remember that when considering the first case before the Supreme Court

to question the meaning of the speech clause, Holmes had to rely on precedent from non

speech cases. Perhaps this is why the emphasis in the opinion Holmes wrote for Schenck was

not on the defendant's speech, but rather on his actions. 82

In order to settle the legal questions posed in Schenck, it was not necessary for

Holmes to interpret the free speech clause ofthe First Amendment (Cohen 110). Even though Schenck's lawyers brought up the speech issue, ironically the legal test that they proposed regarding the limits of free speech might have also been a factor that led Holmes to sustain Schenck's conviction. Schenck's legal team wanted the Court to decide the case based on "whether an expression is made with sincere purpose to communicate honest opinion or belief, or whether it masks a primary intent to incite to forbidden action, or whether it does, in fact, incite to forbidden action" (35). Perhaps the government prosecutors, John Lord O'Brian and Alfred Bettman, exploited the flaw in the defense's test when they argued that the case did not involve free speech but rather the action of mailing the circulars to those who had already been drafted-an action that involved willfully obstructing the draft. Because Schenck's own lawyers conceded that action was punishable whereas speech was not, "Holmes said, in essence, that Congress could prohibit an act that occurred in the guise of speech" (1 00-1 ). In deciding Schenck, Holmes apparently did not consider what was written on the leaflets that Schenck printed but rather focused on how his action of mailing them to men whom had been drafted constituted an infringement of the

Espionage Act.

Because Holmes personally stood in favor of free speech, Chief Justice Edward D.

White might have realized that Holmes's more progressive views had to be accommodated if

all nine justices were to stand together on this case. It might seem strange that Holmes was

chosen to write the opinion, given that his concurrence with the majority was probably not

due to his personal principles or convictions but to his desire that his legal decisions be

consistent with his philosophy of law. Less than a month after the Schenck opinion had been 83 handed down, Holmes confessed to Sir Frederick Pollock that he believed that he "should go

farther probably than the majority in favor of [free speech]" and that it is probably "partly on that account that the C.J. [Chief Justice] assigned the case to [him]" (Howe, Holmes-Pollock

Letters 7). By allowing Holmes to write the opinion for the majority, Chief Justice White might have been trying to appease any of Holmes's putative impulses to write a concurring opinion or else disagree with the Court altogether in dissent. Moreover, by having one of the two most progressive members of the Court write the opinion for somewhat of a reactionary

(although it mirrored the sentiments of the time) decision, the Chief Justice could strengthen the authority of the decision reached by the Court in Schenck. Chief Justice White may have thought that the more progressive sector of the American population would support the

Court's decisions in the speech cases when they discovered those decisions had been penned by their compatriot Justice Holmes.

Eight months after the Schenck opinion was issued, the opinion for Abrams v. United

States, yet another anti-sedition law case involving the freedom of speech, was delivered.

The two cases were very similar; however, in Abrams the defendants distributed their leaflets

in a less calculating way: by throwing them out ofwindows ofbuildings in New York City.

In the Court's written opinion for Abrams, all but two of the justices-Holmes and

Brandeis-laid aside the more liberal "clear and present danger" test and opted to use the

more stringent "bad tendency" test, originally crafted by federal Judge Learned Hand, who

had recently derived the test from English common law. This test essentially asks, "Do the

words have the tendency to bring about something evil?"-an easier question to answer in

the affirmative. The Court could have affirmed Abrams's conviction under the "clear and

present danger" test that proceeded from the Schenck case, so "[ w ]hy the majority shifted 84

constitutional standards is a mystery." (Epstein and Walker 230).

The majority of the Court probably decided to convict Abrams for the same reasons they convicted Schenck, Frohwerk, and Debs. Although eight months had passed between

Schenck and Abrams and the war had been over for almost a year, it seems that the majority

of the Court failed to take into account this changed environment. Zechariah Chafee, Jr., writes that after armistice, the President pardoned or commuted most of the sentences of

those convicted under the Espionage Act, but the trial courts were still filled with cases

involving the 1917 Act as well as state anti-sedition laws (52, n. 30). A number of cases

involving anti-sedition laws that went to the Supreme Court in the 1920s suggest that

although the war was over, patriotism was not. By the time Abrams was tried, the Court had

the precedents arising from Schenck, Frohwerk, and Debs to follow for speech cases.

Because the free speech clause of the First Amendment had not been seriously considered in

these three previous cases, the Court was not compelled to do so in Abrams.

Even though eight months had not made a difference to the majority of the members

ofthe Supreme Court, those eight months in 1919-including a summer recess of the

Court--changed the context from which Justices Holmes and Brandeis were to view Abrams.

We have already seen that immediately after Holmes wrote the opinions for the earlier

speech cases, he was perturbed by what he perceived as the misinterpretation of his ideas in

Schenck by socialists and other progressive thinkers. In April of 1919, a group ofltalian

Communists attempted to mail thirty bombs to prominent officials, one of whom was

Holmes-who was presumably targeted for writing the opinions for the speech cases. The

justice spoke rather jokingly about the experience in a letter to Pollock: "It is one of the

ironies that I, who probably take the extremest [sic] view in favor of free speech (in which, in 85 the abstract, I have no very enthusiastic belief, though I hope I would die for it), that I should have been selected for blowing up" (Howe, Holmes-Pollock Letters 29). He casually mentioned the incident in a letter to Laski in between two comments about British literature:

"I suppose it was the Debs incident that secured me the honor of being among those destined to receive an explosive machine" (Howe, Haimes-Laski Letters 149). While it is unlikely that Holmes was threatened into dissenting in Abrams because of the attempt on his life, the bomb may have alerted him of the dire need to clarify what he meant by the "clear and present danger" test in Schenck. He would be presented with the opportunity to rearticulate what he meant by the test in his dissent in Abrams.

Although Schenck and Abrams appear to be parallel cases that should have been decided in congruent ways, for the rest of his life Holmes unwaveringly clung to the position that he had decided rightly in Schenck. Even so, many legal scholars agree with Semonche that "the difference between Holmes's opinion for the Court in Schenck and his dissent in

Abrams reflects the personal education that took place in the eight months between the two decisions" (174). Most scholars attribute this change to Justice Brandeis's influence on

Holmes, but it has even been argued that Laski arranged a tea with Chafee and Holmes where

Chafee convinced Holmes that he should use the next opportunity he had to protect the freedom of speech (Rogat and O'Fallon 1378). However, not only would Chafee's alleged request probably have been repulsive to Holmes's legal philosophy, but Holmes never once expressed that he wished to recant his position in Schenck. In fact, he affirmed his Schenck decision in his Abrams dissent. While we should not underestimate the influence that his colleague Justice Brandeis had on him during the eight months following Schenck, it is a more likely scenario that the one big difference that Holmes perceived between the two 86 cases-that the nature of the danger posed by Abrams was very minor-played a larger role in his dissent.

Holmes's legal opinions consistently show that if there were a serious clash between governmental and individual rights, he would decide in favor of the former. However,

Holmes did not view Abram's actions as a serious endangerment of the interests ofthe government. Hence he expresses in his dissent, "Now nobody can suppose that the surreptitious publishing of a silly leaflet by an unknown man, without more, would present any immediate danger that its opinions would hinder the success of the government arms or have any appreciable tendency to do so" (qtd. in Epstein and Walker 233). Unlike Schenck, who specifically targeted his leaflet to those who had been drafted, Abrams distributed his circulars by throwing them out of a window of a building in New York City. Konefsky argues that in Abrams, "[n]either the majority nor the minority questioned the constitutionality of the legislation under which the indictment was brought; the disagreement between them turned on the evaluation of the circumstances from which danger could be inferred" (209). John H. Wigmore attributed "the opposite interpretations of the majority and the minority [ ... ] to differences of temperament and attitude towards the issues involved"

(qtd. in 209). Perhaps this was the case. Holmes later wrote of the triad of speech cases, "I could not see the wisdom of pressing the cases, especially when the fighting was over" (qtd. in G. White 423). Both Holmes and Brandeis did not consider national security to be in such peril that it would necessitate a continuance of the Espionage Act when the war was ended, but then again, Holmes had never seen the need for such a law in the first place. This may be because Holmes did not busy himself with keeping up with current affairs and politics-he rarely read newspapers. Enamored with philosophy and literature instead, he was probably 87 sheltered from the influence that cultural pressures that united the country behind the war effort. Therefore, unlike most people at that time, it is possible that Holmes did not perceive speech that opposed the American military as threatening.

Another factor that likely contributed to Holmes and Brandeis's dissent from the majority of the Court was that, for the first time, the two seriously considered the implications of anti-sedition laws on the First Amendment. 17 Most scholars assume that by the time of Abrams, Brandeis's own views in favor of the freedom of speech had been solidified; since he had no qualms as Holmes did about deciding cases based on personal moral convictions, he was easily persuaded by Abrams's legal team. Brandeis's own legal philosophy was directly opposite to that of Holmes; Brandeis believed that through their opinions, justices, like statesmen, should help craft the law to fit the expediencies of the times (cf. Konefsky 302ft).

Although his personal opinion of the case conflicted with the view his legal philosophy provided, it is possible that in Abrams, unlike in Schenck, Holmes based his decision on his personal convictions, essentially changing his mind about the preeminence his legal philosophy had over his conscience. It is likely that Brandeis played an integral part in accounting for Holmes's switch. Perhaps Holmes was led to decide Abrams with his heart rather than his head because of a newfound zeal for the benefits of free speech in a democratic society. The external evidence points in the direction that Holmes's views on

free speech shifted radically over the eight months between Schenck and Abrams; "until his

dissent in the Abrams case, Holmes always discussed free speech from the standpoint of the interests of society in curbing it" (Konefsky 193). Holmes scholar G. Edward White states that Holmes's dissent in Abrams "was to an important extent a response to suggestions 88 implicitly and explicitly made to Holmes by others" (412). It is perhaps the negative response to his opinion in Debs from his young Harvard colleagues, whom Holmes respected, that caused him to foreground his beliefs on free speech in his dissent in Abrams

(Rogat and O'Fallon 1378).

Ironically, Holmes was not usually inclined to offer dissenting opinions. While

Holmes's eloquent dissent in Abrams would earn him the title "The Great Dissenter," the times that Holmes either concurred with the Court's opinion or wrote the majority opinion himself outnumber his dissents by what Alfred Lief estimates as "eight or ten to one" (qtd. in

Konefsky 103). Holmes abhorred the new sobriquet he earned from his Abrams opinion because he did not want to be viewed as a dissenter. Because his dissents were so rare, it is especially notable that he dissented in Abrams.

In his dissent in Abrams, Holmes clarified his opinion in Schenck by stressing,

It is only the present danger of immediate evil or an intent to bring it about

that warrants Congress in setting a limit to the expression of opinion where

private rights are not concerned. Congress certainly cannot forbid all effort to

change the mind ofthe country. Now nobody can suppose that the

surreptitious publishing of a silly leaflet by an unknown man, without more,

would present any immediate danger that its opinions would hinder the

success of the government arms or have any appreciable tendency to do so.

[ ... ] Only the emergency that makes it immediately dangerous to leave the

correction of evil counsels to time warrants making any exception to the

sweeping command, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom

of speech" (qtd. in Epstein and Walker 233). 89

The above effectively accomplished Holmes's goal of championing free speech, and was intended to show that he had stood for free speech in his earlier decisions, which he argued were decided rightly. Whether or not Holmes really supported free speech at the time of the first three speech cases is not really our concern; what matters is that Holmes was intent on using his decision in Abrams to show his progressive colleagues that they were wrong to interpret Schenck as a stroke against the First Amendment. However, it is likely that Holmes was rewriting legal history-his own legal history-to support his current views on civil liberties.

The Abrams case shows that the majority of the Court had to accommodate the dissenting opinion in writing their own opinion. The majority was unable to apply the "clear and present danger" test because they were beaten to it by Holmes, who probably wanted to use Abrams as a chance to clarify this legal doctrine to exonerate himself from misinterpretations of Schenck. It would have been impossible for both the majority and dissenting opinions in Abrams to use the same legal test for support because the author-and therefore the authority--of that test were on the dissenting side. Had the majority read the

"clear and present danger" precedent as justifying the conviction of Abrams, they would have stood in direct contradiction with the "initial" intent of that test, as clarified in the dissent by

Holmes. Had Holmes not been present to interpret the "clear and present danger" test in the way he wanted, the majority ofthe Court could have used it to sustain their opinion.

To sum up my perspective of the evidence, perhaps it is no great mystery why the

Court resorted to Judge Hand's "Bad Tendency" test; only one author-Holmes or Justice

John H. Clarke, who wrote for the majority-could claim the test for himself. Because

Holmes needed his dissent in Abrams to prove that many had misunderstood his original 90 opinion in Schenck, he took that opportunity. Even if Clarke and the majority could foresee that Holmes's rearticulation of"clear and present danger" would undermine their own opinion in Abrams (especially because Holmes had written Schenck and still claimed to hold to the opinion he crafted in that case), they could not prevent Holmes from using the test because anyone on the Court can write anything they want. Ifthe majority had used the

"clear and present danger" to convict, this would have only exacerbated their propensity to appear on the wrong side of the case. Therefore, the real mystery of Abrams is not why the majority of the Court did not use the "clear and present danger" test, but why Holmes and

Brandeis were unable to persuade the rest ofthe members of the Court to see the Abrams case their way.

Of course, that last sentence betrays my opinion that Holmes and Brandeis were in the right while the rest of the court was wrong. One (ofthe numerous) biases in the above narrative is the tendency for it to read as a tragedy by Frye's definition. For example, it was

a tragedy for Schenck to be convicted of the Espionage Act of 1917 when he was merely

trying to convince drafted soldiers to not join the war effort. It was tragic that the Court

affirmed this decision of the lower courts and tragic that Holmes and Brandeis agreed with

this decision. However, in this narrative, we see the development of a character. Holmes

eventually regrets his initial decision, but he is given a second chance. However, the

majority of the Court still voted to convict, so the story ends with the triumph of the villains.

At the same time, it is a victory for Holmes because although he could not exonerate Abrams,

he had the chance to define the legal precedent that he invented, which would ultimately

become some of the most famous words handed down by the bench (thanks in part to Tom

Clancy). The reader of my narrative will probably be left with the feeling that Holmes and 91

Brandeis were the true winners in this case, if only because the rest of the members of the

Court's reputations suffered when they could not employ the "clear and present danger" test in their opinion. The reader should be warned, however, that I am giving a certain meaning to these events, although it is a meaning that serves our society well given present attitudes towards the freedom of speech. However, perhaps at the time that the two cases were decided, no one cared to notice that the Court did not use "clear and present danger," and it is only in retrospect that we as an American culture have come to see the 1919 Court in the wrong. After all, some of us have never seen a major war.

Finally, although the above narrative represents my beliefs as to why the Supreme

Court used different precedents in the Schenck and Abrams cases, perhaps the knowledge gained from my narrative can be employed in the service of another problem inside or outside of the discipline ofhistory. For example, as politically and culturally important as

Supreme Court decisions are, Lee Epstein and Thomas G. Walker assert that "there is considerable disagreement in the scholarly and legal communities about why justices decide cases the way they do ...." (42). However, because Supreme Court justices have formally unchecked power, it is of prime importance to know what drives the Court to their legal decisions so that the American populace is assured that it is not being tyrannized by this undemocratic institution. Perhaps the insight we have gained about how the Court decided to employ (or not employ) legal precedent in Schenck v. United States and Abrams v. United

States-two similar cases separated by just eight months-might help us understand the inner-workings of the Court and predict under what circumstances the Court will develop new legal doctrines. Perhaps my narrative could aid a political scientist writing an opinion piece on how and why the power of the Supreme Court should be more restricted. At any -- ~~ ~~ ~------~ --

92 rate, my narrative has offered one perspective of the Court that can broaden one's knowledge of legal development.

Conclusions that can be Drawn from My Application

After actually attempting to apply my six principles to a written historical account, I can make some judgements as to which principles were applicable and served me well and which ones did not. It was fairly easy to apply rhetorical strategies that indicated my tentative stance. At the same time, showing my tentativeness was challenging; if readers were to perceive the account as merely one equally valid perspective among innumerable others, they might wonder why I even chose to write about the subject unless I had reasons for believing my account to be more accurate than the others written to date. Although finding the balance between these two extremes is not an easy task, it can be done, as I have demonstrated. Although I did not fully expect it when I was theorizing, another one of my principles that seemed to be successful was making suggestions on how to apply historical knowledge gained from the account to other areas of inquiry. However, finding knowledge that would serve other disciplines could be a challenge for the historian if only because the practical application of historical knowledge is best done by those who have an argument or problem and who are looking for potential evidence or answers. In other words, other disciplines should turn to history; history should not arbitrarily give answers to other disciplines whether they want these answers or not. I can only speculate that the knowledge gained from looking at the relationship between the written opinions for the Schenck and

Abrams cases could aid a political scientist or, indeed, any situation in which two groups with competing interests are trying to reach a written agreement that can be interpreted 93 uniformly by both groups.

One of my principles that was met with limited success was the attempt to communicate to my readers that I was imposing an interpretation in the form of a plot structure upon the events. Even though I futilely struggled to definitively find examples of tragedy, romance, comedy, and irony in my narrative, I did detect a general plot pattern of tragic experiences that are ultimately righted in Holmes's case, and he emerges with the inverse of a Pyrrhic victory: a loss that comes with the great satisfaction of having the opposing side appear to be in the wrong. However, I did point out this bias of mine to my readers at the end and mentioned that at the time, perhaps the American people did not think the majority of the Court looked foolish for reverting to Justice Hand's "bad tendency" test.

Because it was part of my human nature to make sense of and a story out of the details I regarded as important in relation to the events in my narrative, I tried to make it clear that my application of gestalt is not the only one. Although I did not do so, perhaps it would have been appropriate to reformulate the events into alternative plot structures and then respond to them; this would have been a good next step had I the time to review the evidence from a different perspective.

The principle of asking relevant questions of my evidence seems to have been met automatically met by virtue of having a purpose for writing my account. I did not have to consciously think of the questions that I asked the texts and evidence that I was examining; rather, I did this tacitly. This leads me to think that Collingwood was offering description more than prescription when he said that each historian had to recreate the past for his or her own time and culture. Of course, this ensures that written history can never be objective, and as Collingwood mentioned, the historian is always part of the account he or she writes. 94

Collingwood noticed that he himself always had different questions when approaching the same text at different times, and he probably inferred that others did as well. Given that most

(if not all) historians have a motive for studying the topics they do, I think it would be impossible to not ask relevant questions ofthe evidence. Therefore, this principle is done intuitively (I am perhaps dismissing this issue too quickly) and does not really need to be thought about when one is trying to practice history. Although it would be ideal if the historian could also be self-reflexive about the questions he or she is asking, determining these questions might be just as problematic as detecting history.

Also, I found the principle of communicating to the reader the idea that history is

"web-like" was nearly impossible. As much as I could, I included in my account all ofthe details that might have shaped the justices' decisions. Of course, I cannot say for sure that I included "all" of the evidence because surely when I did my research, I intuitively selected some factors as relevant and some as not. However, I do not even remember the factors I deemed irrelevant-and they might not be irrelevant for a different context from my own.

Therefore, there are various lacunae in my account, but because I do not know what they are,

I cannot alert my readers to them. My conclusion about this principle, then, is that while understanding historical accounts as "web-like" knowledge seems to be an accurate perception, it is not really something that the writer can mention in his or her narrative except to say something like, "There could be undiscovered evidence that, ifknown, could entirely change the structure and meaning of this account."

Finally, the most difficult principle to apply to my account-and the principle that seems to be most frequently stressed by rhetoricians who write about historiography-was the attempt to explain my context and relationship to my subject or, in other words, to be 95 self-reflexive. In the opening paragraphs of the account, I attempted to alert my readers to the fact that my personal interest and stake in the subject may have influenced my conclusions about it. While I stopped short of saying it, I tried to let the readers know that I considered Holmes and Brandeis to be the "good guys" of the narrative; the other justices were the "villains." Moreover, I wrote myself into the account, if only to appease White's concern that the narrator appear to be objective and absent. Of course, when I got into the historical details of the narrative, I found it difficult to continue my presence as narrator in the story. The parts of the account that I have explicitly entered are only the beginning and the end. Except once near the end when I wrote, "To sum up my perspective of the evidence" (88), I did not say things like, "I think event A led to event B" in the heart ofthe narrative; rather, I tended to express subjectivity in terms oftentativeness ("Event A probably led to event B"). Admittedly, my reluctance to experiment with writing myself into the narrative shows that I have been socialized into thinking in terms of what history is and what it is not.

I would like to stress the radical divergence from conventional historiography that postmodern historiography represents. In today's academic climate, "postmodernist" principles for doing historiography are difficult to follow. Even rhetoricians have noted that postmodernist historiography has not been practiced consistently by the members ofthe discipline of rhetoric; this is one of the points that Victor J. Vitanza makes in his '"Notes'

Towards Historiographies ofRhetorics; or the Rhetorics of the Histories of Rhetorics;

Traditional, Revisionary, and SubNersive."18 Vitanza laments:

... we Rhetoricians are not self-consciously aware of the Rhetorics ofHistories

when we Write our Histories ofRhetorics. Therefore, I emphasize (again): In 96

theory, we, occasionally in our journal articles and convention presentations

and conversations, understand Rhetorics and Ideologies; in practice, however,

we, in our histories, ironically demonstrate a lack of awareness of them. (7 4)

Perhaps it is so difficult for rhetoricians (and others) to practice postmodemist historiography because at this time there is a relative absence of examples ofpostmodem-influenced histories. Those that do exist (Vitanza's article for instance), seem wildly incoherent in places and offer no solid conclusions or knowledge that can be used in service to other disciplines. Maybe the traditional historian is correct: postmodemism is of little use to the discipline of history. It seems, and I hope to be wrong, that in order for history to serve a purpose in the larger world, it must search for covering laws and ways to make meaning out of the past. However, postmodemism resists such conceptions of history. For the time being, hopefully more rhetoricans like Vitanza will attempt to write postmodemist historical accounts that can show how history is useful to other scholarly areas. If Vitanza and others succeed, perhaps the discipline ofhistory will take notice and members of the general community of historians will begin to incorporate more anti-foundationalist approaches into their historiography. If rhetoricians fail in this task, however, then history and

postmodernism probably will not have much of a future together. 97

NOTES

1 "Historiography," of course, has at least three meanings: (1) the literature that has been written about the history of a subject, (2) the methodological principles of historical detection, and (3) the process of writing history. In this thesis, I will use the term to refer to

\ theoretical principles that inform the writing and/or the construction of historical accounts.

2 I apologize for mentioning this work that shows up in nearly every bibliography of articles that deal with postmodemism. Kuhn's book itself has been somewhat mis-adopted by postmodemists, who claim that it is a more postmodem work than Kuhn intended.

3 The responses to Richard Rorty by American philosophers largely attest to this fear.

4 The fact that these articles are centered almost exclusively in one journal does not imply that the discipline of history is ignoring postmodemism as much as it belies historians' general dismissal of all theoretical issues.

5 Of course, this phrase was not used in Collingwood's time. Carl Hempel, one of

Richard Rorty's teachers who later told him, "You have betrayed everything I stood for," after reading Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature (cf. Lingua Franca, Dec 2000/ Jan

2001, p. 42) was the originator of this term.

6 Qtd. in Parker 213 from "The Principles of History," pp. 41-4. This documentis part of a larger set called the Collingwood Papers, which are unpublished and housed in the

Bodleian Library in Oxford, England.

7 Qtd. in Parker 175 from Speculum Mentis ofthe Map ofKnowledge, Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1924. 98

8 Qtd. in Parker 181 from the 1994 edition of The Idea ofHistory, which contains previously unpublished material. This quote is from the "Lectures on the Philosophy of

History" given in 1926.

9 I am assuming that "modern" in this context means "contemporary" and possibly even "postmodern" rather than "modern" in a sense that refers back to scientific positivism.

1°Cf. Appleby et al., Telling the Truth About History (New York/London, 1994), p.

53ff.

11 Many scholars complain about the inconsistencies and contradictions that characterize White's work. Some attempt to avoid these problems by summarizing White's thought by a chronological analysis of his writings, although this approach tends to bury

White's core ideas. Noel Carroll, in his highly critical article of White, gives perhaps the most comprehensive and accurate account-rather, the one that matches most closely to my own conception--<>fWhite's ideas.

12 This conclusion might be reached by those who are cursorily informed about

White's works, as one of his essays is entitled "The Value ofNarrativity." However, this phrase should be interpreted as arguing that narrative is not neutral-it has a value, rather than suggesting that narrative is valuable.

13 Vann mentions that L. B. Cebik in "Fiction and History: A Common Core?''

International Studies in Philosophy 24 (1992), 47-63 claims that a "real" past or "real events" do not exist in White's mind. Both V ann and I would agree that this is far from the truth. 99

14 White would be one of the first to attest that in writing about anything, one must select some aspects of it and disregard the others, but some ofwhat I have left out of my summary of White's ideas is so major as to deserve at least a brief mention. White augments his lists of four emplotment structures and four tropes of description with four explanatory strategies (Idiographic, Organicist, Mechanistic, and Contextualist) and four ideological perspectives (Anarchist, Conservative, Radical, and Liberal) (70). However, it is difficult enough to find discussions (within the work of both White and others) of how the plots and the tropes inform (or should inform) the work ofwriting narratives, and it is even more of a challenge to find analyses of how the four explanatory strategies or the four ideologies effect historical accounts. While these schemes represent intriguing aspects of White's work, until they become of more interest to scholars, it does not make sense for me to include them in a discussion of how White's ideas could inform a postmodem conception of historiography.

15 Although, if Collingwood is correct, too much evidence makes the writing of history nearly impossible, and given our modem day fascination with archives and electronic records, it is very likely that any future study of our particular historical age will be a very

complex process indeed.

16 Admittedly, it seems that if knowledge is to be gained from history and applied to

other disciplines, this cannot happen unless the historian is attempting to discover "covering

law" models. While both Collingwood and White encouraged the first and discouraged the

latter, neither of them offers a way in which this contradiction can be overcome. Ifthere is a

way by which this can be done (and I hope that there is), I have not thought of it. 100

17 Cohen argues that Schenck was not a case about the freedom of speech at all; while

Schenck's defense argued that the Espionage Act violated the First Amendment's protection of free speech, the only legal questions that the Court could rule on concerned whether or not

Schenck's actions violated the Espionage Act, and they clearly did. The constitutionality of the Espionage Act in light of the First Amendment was not in the purview ofthe Court to decide in Schenck.

18 Vitanza says, "We are always already interpreting any text from any archive across at least tacitly present hermeneutical methods. Not to be conscious of those methods is to fall prey to perhaps a form of ideological terrorism" (93, emphasis in the original). While I am not saying it is impossible, I think that it is extremely challenging to "be conscious of those methods" (perhaps some are just too lazy to take the time to be self-reflexive), but even more importantly, if one believes that he or she does know the tacit methods used to address the text, one might mistakenly think he or she is being objective in a relative sense. This is dangerous as well. I think the best that can be done is to state one's methods as far as one is aware of them but to also be conscious that it is likely that so much more is still unknown to oneself and others. 101

WORKS CITED

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(1998): 182-93.

Bates, David. "Rediscovering Collingwood's Spiritual History (In and Out of Context)."

History and Theory 35.1 (1996): 29-55.

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